Family Sojourn

(i) Jet Lag, Fever
Bored with my small dark room
I bring my fever out into the sun —
fighting heat with heat. In dressing gown,
sunglasses, slung in fold-up chair,
I watch starlings in a shimmer of
bronze and ebony. A far gull stitches
pines and eucalypts together.
Everywhere, a crimson or green
translucency as my father and mother
weed, re-arrange, tend future life.
A magpie opens its beak's red chamber,
yawns; swooping low over this
floral runway, it leaves to inhabit
some other part of the afternoon.
(ii) Kaleidoscope
To Kyle, my nephew
Inside your new kaleidoscope you place
fern leaf, petal, moonstone earring.
We lie on the lounge room floor,
angle it towards window and lampshade,
gasp at that jewelled flowering world.
Later, you giddily act out how planet earth
revolves around the sun, then wait to be
programmed, wearing a robot's silver smile.
Worlds we inherit, the worlds we invent…
Somewhere between the two we live,
gaze at the lit circle of feldspar, flower
and fern, in multiplied transparency —
cosmologies we may summon and dismiss
in an instant, or ponder in stillness.