/

These days.

Seldom do I leave my house, but at every evening I take my walk across the road and around some paradise. Memory walks beside me, such wonderful company to keep as we look out over this humble lake that carries an orchestra of birds. Herons, egrets, black swans, pelicans, wood ducks and cormorants. I love watching the spoonbills with their awkward bills do their choreographed dance of survival, the way they feed is mesmerising. For a moment I find myself slightly envious that I am just a spectator in this great symphony but it soon passes again to awe and I am glad to play my part.

My longing for the sea eagle takes my gaze to the sky, but my eyes return empty of it…there is no sea eagle here. I turn to Memory and ask for remembrance of this bird of prey. Together we trace the memory of it, I remember the way it moves, how quietly confident, how skilled and how wonderfully dark, dangerous and passionate this magnificent bird is. As I come out of remembrance the swallows soar with movements that speak to me only of friendly freedom and I feel myself content. Blue purple plumage becomes iridescent as it catches the last light of the setting sun, it’s the Pukeko, I gently smile at Memory and I am ready to return home.

/

for one year. lost.

lost. for one year.

father’s swan song

daughter’s mourning

/

Not all roses have thorns,

I remember the way those words were spoken,

spoken like the scent of rosemary freshly cut with such certainty and tenderness.

A certainty and tenderness that felt like those words had rather come from the place of memory, and I was left speechless and again wondered if we’d been here before.

I looked upon home where roses without thorns grew like weeds and I fell to my knees as that certainty and tenderness tore my heart open like only a rose without thorns can. I lay motionless for a long while and as the petals of the dying roses fell, I became shrouded in the memory of before, and what is yet to be.