Before the Rains

                             

Before the rains

red is the colour

as sunset bleeds into this land.

Tendrils of termites

embrace the trunks

as pale leaves sink

little by little into

a sift of dust.

On the paths

white bones gleam

beside footprints

of those fleeing

in circles

from the long hunger.

Anne Chappel

My Father

He does not listen any more, my Father,

when I phone him from across the world,

same day, same time every week.

His words carry a message he will not speak.

I cannot answer, for what can I offer?

I would like to say that I will be here

to listen again, to believe the past;

stories of old worlds he lived through,

for the present is a confusion.

His eye’s centre has disappeared,

slipped away, blanked out from overuse.

He has seen too much in the tropical suns.

Words I have heard before keep flowing,

as I listen to his breath, 
the heart beneath

and the life,
more precious than I can say.

The Shell Collection

Before she died, my friend returned

her shell collection to the sea.

It was where they belonged, she said,

where they gleam brightest.

These are their remains

that in death make a beach.

Caressed by waves, pounded by storms,

marked by tides,

sorted and resorted by shape and size,

part of earth’s pattern in every day’s

new arrangement.

The tide turns and pauses

like a breath, out and in,

then the sigh,

the wait of a moment,

the choice of life rather than death.

And so I remember her.

When I walk the sea’s edge

and stop before a shell,

whose shape and form,

like some treasure dazzles me,

I pass by, letting the earth claim her own.

©Anne Chappel