~ Janet Kenny ~



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Double Dizain in Black and White

Whoosh

Indifference

Upwelling Water





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Double Dizain in Black and White


Australian Magpies in learic Mode


Black and white birds daily stand
on the painted paling fence.
Their invasion was unplanned,
they are there at my expense
for the paint bill was immense.
Optical illusions grow
as they preen there just to show
white and black can syncopate,
making patterns as they go
prancing on my garden gate.

Ebony and ivory,
magpies ululate and clong
musical as birds can be.
Carillon of joyful song
rings around the whole day long.
Glockenspiels, harmonicas,
dominant and tonic is
played against a minor note.
Everything euphonic is
poured forth from the magpie's throat.




© Copyright 2001 Janet Kenny


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Photo credit: Andy Readman






Whoosh


Slipped between worse winter was
something wetly dank. Birds huddled,
humped, resigned. Ants moped because
their sandstone caves were puddled;
no road led to roam. Worms twined
sans slither, sulked in slime together
under earthen pots, confined
and chafed to glide in wetter weather.
Thunder crashed and belting rods
of rain like rockets washed in waves
across the courtyard; ancient gods
of elemental mayhem. Graves
of spiders -- lizards swept from shelter
whooshed down drains to join the ocean,
helpless flounderers; things skelter,
powerless to resist the motion.
What a way to run a planet
ever thus since gods began it.


© Copyright 2001 Janet Kenny


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Indifference

(An Australian Journey)


Always another hill, with surely an end
to this journey where endless vistas extend
to the next horizon and the next, with glare--
effaced shadows whose ghosts are there,
under trees that offer no shade to those
in search of somewhere cool to park and doze.
The ice long melted in the Esky, and bush flies
gather on shirt backs; the empty skies,
impartial, bleach the wombat's skull beside
the road, the ant-cleaned sockets dried
meaningless. The eucalypt tree
is monument to what they cannot see.
In vain to look for purpose in the void
where some survive and others are destroyed.


© Copyright 2001 Janet Kenny


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Upwelling Water


Upwelling water, liquid language spews
images of ocean-currents running
up hill -- they do, and when I heard that news
I knew I'd lose, if even water's cunning
enables it to climb as well as flow.
What can I trust when evidence so stunning
as water always falling has to go?

I read of ocean-currents, and new fears
invaded me, because if sun could drive
the wind, then everything appears
as something else, in short, how could I strive
to comprehend such an elusive trend?
So complicated just to stay alive?
Predictability seems at an end.
All cross-grained elements seem to connive.

Igneous rock is where the water starts,
and moves between the different stages, where
it turns to gas, or snow, or ice, and parts
return as rain, to irrigate and share
its aqueous advantages; it bubbles
deep-down, oozing sponge-like in the earth,
to slowly save us all from man-made troubles,
teaching us upwelling water's worth.
Splash, trickle, tumble, shoot towards the sky,
curved wave reveals birds swim and fishes fly.


© Copyright 2001 Janet Kenny


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