Poems: Perfection & Riding the air
Nature and landscape, as seen through a painting and then by Blue Mountains bushwalking, form this week’s Poet’s Corner contributions from Valerie Derry.
Perfection
French countryside
You draw a picture of hills
and valleys,
mirror-flat rivers
laced with trees –
you draw a stone arch
to frame the scene,
and a bird on the window-sill,
an inquisitive robin.
This is a vision from
some other place,
where the seasons
are reversed.
And you become aware
that the acrylic sky
is as real,
as melancholy blue,
as perfect, in fact,
as the one above us.
Riding the air
Blue Mountains, New South Wales
Into a lost valley, where the voice
of water comes drifting upward
on cool eucalypt air,
we press on…
and down, with the tree-clenching
stone stairway oblivious
to our feet.
No mark is made,
no pattern of our passing left behind,
no tension on the wind of that green
vault, but from this day
your glance begins to trace a path
through the parched, leafless stone
of a brown river-bed…
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And soon, there are tiny
silver shoots and red-tipped
stars pulsing and swaying,
drawn on a yearning filament
to your fingertips, almost visible
to the naked eye.
Valerie Derry lives on the New South Wales Central Coast. A dedicated language student in her school years, she is a retired English teacher and member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Her poetry has appeared previously in the former Poets’ Union of New South Wales’ journal ‘Five Bells’. A keen bushwalker, she has also visited the French countryside, of which she has written her ekphrastic, a poem about a painting, today.