This poem carries faint echoes of winter in a Mediterranean climate, in this case the South West of Western Australia; limpid skies, stormclouds threatening, people in overcoats walking hastily. Rather like an English summer, I would have thought!

 

And Now I'm Old

And now I'm old as softening apples

left forgotten on a sideboard

after a windy day,

the murmur of the evening room

asks nothing but its hourly chimes,

anoints only the balm of solitude and sway.

 

And on so ordinary a night,

though no moon's clear, and only rags of clouds

slide like spectral sharks across the deep,

and planets stare without comment or demur,

out-twinkled but not outshone

in their ordinary light, spinning on

 

beyond the house on Watertower Hill,

where ocean views amuse real-estate novelists

not at all,

and where grey slate floors

slowly lose their Winter chill,

the call of nightbirds holds the air

in quiet thrall.

 

And now I'm old as jarrah trees

gathered round abandoned saw-pits

in the slanted rays of faded afternoons,

the restless forest peace asks only time

to mark the land-breeze

with waterfalls of rustle, quickening

the loom of ended day.

 

Chris Hubbard,

Perth

2001