Short notes from the Pirate Tour (and beyond)

[handslive]

I took a small journal along with me on the camping trip. I originally picked this up when we were going to the UK the first time. I honestly wasn't sure how my evenings would be spent in all cases or what our days would be like. For the most part it sat untouched. I did write a short intro to a story I've tried to start unsuccessfully several times. I also wrote a short tidbit (edited, which I can't do with the ink version):

Begin Again

The pen is silent
Too frightened to speak
       unpracticed, clumsy
The noise and work of building
       amusing, loving
Has filled the space this voice once held

Such work sufficient
       to the means of life and loving,
Drowns out the silence
       no inky dark, but blankness
No scribble
No flashing thought
No shaft of light
No colour

How do I stretch myself again
Breathe deep and sing?

That summarizes the feeling for me well, although I've said other things about it here. It might seem like an "all at once", but the urge to write something, even drivel, was building for several years. The text on that page before the links to the (mostly old) poems was written shortly after I had read Sailing to Sarantium for the very first time. But I hadn't yet written 'Living', which you can link to on that page. The other stuff on that page was mostly written in my second year of university, 1986 - 1987. And some of it I'm still not finished with. And some of it I'm not particularly proud of. (If I had to make suggestions, I'd point at 'On the Dark and Narrow', 'The Ghost', 'Duet', and 'Graveyard Shift' among the older stuff.)

These are some random notes made during the camping trip. I actually saw the first 'moment' and the last, but the others were elaborations on half-remembered moments from my childhood during a forest fire outside of Swan Hills.

...a straggling column of smoke drifting behind a distant mountain peak, only suddenly seen to be feeding the enormous, blue-grey cloud filling the valley...

...I remember the smoke outside of town, white and grey and black, filling the sky, the fake sunset to the south underlighting the smoke and clouds...

...the swathes of smoking forest, a haunted ruin, black and grey pillars standing or leaning crazily over a carpet of ash and thick white haze...

...a humming bird floating impossibly just beyond her shoulder...