Leaves are the tiny steps I took

Just look ahead to the next light through leaf, to the next step and the leaves on the ground. I could not raise my head high for such a long time. Now I am an ‘elder’, over 55 years!! I am no longer seeking that dream. And the pain of relinquishing that in the last five years, phew, sends me to the water, wherever it is near me.

So I became very familiar with the path. Also obsessed with following it. To not misstep. Painting leaves drawing leaves. Collecting leaves. How they fall often from gum trees and have rainbows of colours. Accompanied by scarves of bark shed in the summer heat waves. The tree trunks naked to the amazing blue skies here and the hot sun. It burns you deeply here, so the leaves mean shelter and also the sound

Sound of leaves in the breeze here sounds like ocean waves or the coming storms or the telling of tales that are ancient they have become the streams and flow to the ocean who speak the songs on the shores. So many beaches you cannot live long enough to see them all.

Or snapped portions of newly grown tips of gum leaves, koala sorted or cockatoo shredded tips of yellow green strew the paths. Then the soft tiny fragments of gun blossoms creating a yellow down surface to foot your feet across the sandstone crumbles.

The season of fallen sticks and branches of curling shapes that echo the way the river dances through the ground carving the earth into patterns of pi. So the scientists can count and maniple its thighs.

this collection of leaves and gum pods sits entwined with shell house of sea creatures and riverdbed shells crating a visual echo of encouragement to use the fear to create lift and find the next leaf.

The miracle of the whole story is that feathers mimic the shape of leaves. 

That grief and fear in fact can grow into leaves and feathers and finally flight. Then a garden embedded int hearth too. All of it makes a kind of terrible sense.

Anyhow the poem is possibly easier to understand then this ramble of connections. To me it makes sense of course. BYUt iahve watched and thought about these things my whole life. If you haven’t noticed theses small things then perhaps I have noticed your small mercies. Anyhow that’s why my new poetry book will called ‘giver of small things’

these small things have guided me through very wonderful, strong and terrifying times.