Echo

Welcome!

flowering eucalypt

My family and I are about to head off for a visit to Cambodia, and one of my concerns is how we’ll manage the humid heat. Adelaide enjoys generally low humidity, which is why so many of our homes use evaporative cooling instead of air-conditioning. This also satisfies the Aussie predilection for bringing the outside inside, since evap cooling requires windows/doors to be open. Fortunately (?) our evap cooling hasn’t been working reliably in the last couple of weeks, so we’ve been acclimatising to heat discomfort, the perfect preparation for our South East Asian jaunt!

Today marks the first half year of this blog, and ushers in a couple of changes. I’ll be posting half as often (i.e. fortnightly) from now on (I can’t write fast enough to do it justice weekly), and the mix of prose and poetry will be less predictable.

My offering today is a recently written free verse poem.  Whether you like it, hate it, or just don’t get it, why not leave a comment and share your thoughts with other readers?

Echo

I know what it is to be a ghost

 as insubstantial as a mist

where others look through to someone beyond you

and the only presence you have is as

a memory

an echo

 forgotten as soon as it is heard

overtaken by someone more solidly present,

louder, more demanding.

I stand, a shadow in a deserted temple,

where nothing moves but the wind

in the dry leaves gusting

here

             there

    grouped momentarily

and then scattered.

All is gone but the shadow

the memory

the echo

  fading

     into silence.

Until we meet again...

Claire Belberg