Moments in Nature

By The Society of Women Writers WA

Moments in Nature is a delightful compilation of short stories, poems and articles from members of The Society of Women Writers WA. These creative works reveal women writers' interactions with the environment; in some cases, their angst of the world's environmental issues; in others, their appreciation of nature and their experiences in gro

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linellen Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922727442

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to our beloved Patron,

Mrs Ruth Reid, AM, CIT WA, for her support

and dedication to The Society of Women Writers WA

and its members, all of whom are proud

to call her ‘Patron’ and ‘Friend’.

Acknowledgments

The Society of Women Writers WA Inc would like to acknowledge the following members for their collective efforts in bringing members’ writing to publication: the Selection panel – Jan Altmann, Sue Colyer, Helen Iles, Valerie Lee, and Shirley Rowland – the anthology Receiving Officer and book designer Helen Iles, and proof reader Maria Bonar. We thank each of you for bringing Moments in Nature to fruition.

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Contents

Bennu

Maggie

A Moment in Nature

The Soul

Nature Cycles

Cosmos

Elegy for Kristina

Emperor Penguin

FIFO Cat

Last Dance

Mother’s Day

Profit before Planet

Wild Colonial Girl

Ants

Australian Bustard

Forest Glimpses

Pipit

Skylark

Pom

Blackbird

Just being

Nature red in tooth and claw

Nature’s Demise

Fire and Flooding Rains

Gold

Old Growth

Tree Change

Bingo and BBQs

If You Gotta Go, You Gotta…

Unexpected

It’s Just a Spider

Peaceful Place

(Martin Curtis  1935 - 2019)

My Miss-Adventure

Nature’s Violence

A Dalliance with Nature

In ancient woodland

Love Letter from the Grave

Red Book

A Safari Adventure

At the Beach

Walkies

Treasure

This Special Day

In One Fowl Swoop

Study Time

Daisy-Faces and Me

Racing the Eagle

Limoncello

The Innocent Learn from Nature

The Little Red Dressing Gown

Intrepid Squirrel

The Enemy

Our Eco Footprint: Where Do We Start?

Poetic Reference

A Dylan Thomas Portrait Poem

Around the Firepit

Search for the Red-footed Booby

By the ocean

The clothes peg mystery

Sunset at Joondalup

Sea Moon

Relocation

QCC

Mighty Reptiles

Outside my window

Unwanted Visits

A Dinner Treat

Transformation

Bird Hide

Soliloquy

A Bird in the Hand …

Autumn Morning

Bird Watching at the Lake

From Field to Florabase

From the Patio

Much More Than Mining

Autumn

Raining Consistently

The Water Bottle is Running Dry

About The Society of Women Writers WA

Bennu

Unblinking and statue still

on stick black legs it stood.

Porcelain white, erect, composed and complete.

Red tiled roof of our neighbour’s home beneath,

palm branches green on the blue sky above.

Solitude and symbol came together.

Graceful neck, slender body,

beak pointing outwards and upwards,

it breathed meditation and majesty.

I didn’t see it arrive or leave.

Was it a messenger from the gods?

The Egyptians thought so.

Self-created, Bennu the sacred Heron

shone like the sun, giving light to the earth

and nourishment to its people.

Rising from the Nile each year,

without leaving a ripple on the water

he brought rain to the crops in the fields.

After death, he transformed soul into spirit.

Led it gently into the afterlife

until it too was ready to rise again.

To the Greeks, Heron was sacred to Athena,

always ready to defend good from evil,

flying only with honour and virtue.

Could it teach us also to look outwards and upwards?

To be at peace with the mysteries that surround us

and not to fight against them?

Jan Altmann

Maggie

I heard her calling again this morning

across the street and through the trees,

further away than she used to be,

but as pleading and as plaintive as before.

Hungry, limping and lost, feathers awry,

she appeared on the lawn.

Blown off course by a storm

or driven away by her own kind.

Keats was transported into vision and ecstasy,

freed, just for an instant, from pain and sorrow,

by the eternal truth and beauty

in the song of his magical nightingale.

Shelley poured into his poetry the ‘unbodied joy’

that came from the song of his skylark;

learnt to live in the moment,

with neither grief for past nor care for the future.

With food to eat and a bath to play in

her song became tuneful and clear.

Her black and white feathers

were yin and yang, light and dark, pain and joy.

Bloodied head and beak made it known

that her time had come.

But there was no need to fear or fret

She sings to the sky and the clouds, just as she did before.

Jan Altmann

A Moment in Nature

She lay by the window. Her small frame occupied so little of the bed, her face, white, still, and tinged with sadness. Her little fingers held the soft bear close to her as she took comfort from its silky texture. He looked like Paddington B Bear except for the texture of his coat, so she called him Paddington B Bear, and loved him for the touch of his silky coat against her skin.

The window was large and overlooked the garden, which her mother tended each day. The blooms that gave off scent, her mother planted close to the window so her daughter could smell the perfume when the window was opened. The range of colours in the garden was like a rainbow, some bright and loud and some soft and gentle.

Some days she was carried out into the garden so she could watch her mother as she explained the blooms she was planting. Some days when she had the energy, she would reach out and touch the petals and feel the softness in her hand, and her small heart would be glad of the contact.

But now her days were more confined to the inside of the house as the autumn winds began to rise and the sun came and went, causing her little body to shiver.

She understood the seasons in a way neither her father nor her mother could imagine. She knew her seasons were at an end. That she would see this winter through but in the spring, as her mother tended the flowers so carefully, her time to bloom would be over. Nature had always allowed her to see her life as seasons, and her moments of love and growth could be no longer.

She knew the eight years of her life had contained moments of time when her petals had opened, and the bees and birds had enjoyed her nectar. When her classmates had visited and watched over her with the open-hearted love that only small children can give.

They gave of their innocence and wisdom as they held her hand and guided her drawings. Funny songs they had sung together and soft whispers of mischief they shared – the nonsense times when nothing made sense to any of them, and it truly didn’t matter. Those were the times when she never wanted them to go.

Now the fun times only lasted for a short while as her tired eyes drooped so quickly. And she turned to Paddington B Bear for solace.

Her mother stood beside her pink coffin and described their lives to the church full of families, families who had been her friends:

"I knew when I planted the flowers beneath her window that they would grow and flower and then go back into the earth.

I knew when my daughter came home from hospital that she too would grow and flower, and then be reclaimed.

I wanted her to stay longer and then, when I saw her eyes grow so tired, I knew. She was asking me for permission to let her moment in this garden of life come to an end. I understood too that she wanted to enjoy all of God’s seasons and to tend His garden with Him.

And I suspect that there is a Paddington B Bear who is sharing all these moments of nature with her."

With the mother’s heart breaking, she finished her eulogy:

Rest in peace, my flower. Thank you for blooming in my garden.

Lynley Barnett

The Soul

His soul wandered desolately through the cemetery caught by the parameters of the graveyard, moving slowly from corner to corner, past monuments, and gravestones, past flowers and ponds,  doomed to be captive within the walls of the burial grounds of so many.

The history of the city could be traced through those that inhabited the sacred plots. The graves spoke of the farmers, the soldiers, the workers, the mothers, and occasionally those who had left this earth in the flowering of their youth. But their souls had risen to be rewarded for their well-lived lives, while his was condemned to stay aimless and wandering.

He knew he deserved this nothingness, this emptiness, this inability to touch or be touched, and this agony of floating incompleteness. He knew when the pathway of death had enveloped him that his life so badly lived was only worthy of condemnation. But he had not realised that his soul would be left in this eeriness of nothing, without life, without purpose, condemned to this suspended state because he could no longer make reparation for the sins he had committed while he had inhabited the earth.

Day followed night followed day followed night as his soul touched the top of the tombstones and the newly dug graves. As he watched, another coffin was slowly lowered into the ground. This was the same as before, the same as before, the same as before.

His soul drifted over his headstone, and he read again, as he had done so many times before, John Timothy Smith. Born 1960 Died 2020, the few words inscribed on his bare stone.

No words that said loved son, or loved husband of, or father of. No vase of flowers tended lovingly, placed beside the etchings. The grass was cut by the workmen, not clipped by little sheers held tenderly by a loved one. No visitors stopped to gaze with affection at his gravesite, nor say a prayer for him.

His gift to his community was nothing, and his sparsely worded gravestone reflected nothingness, and his soul continued in its entrapment. The same as before.

A young girl entered the cemetery carrying a large bunch of flowers. She was followed by her mother. They walked towards the newest monument and, kneeling, began to arrange the flowers in a beautiful crystal glass vase, talking animatedly about the father and husband whose graveside they decorated. They prayed together and, holding hands, sang a lovely slow hymn over his grave as they placed a photo by the vase. The picture reflected three people. The husband, the wife and the young girl, her arms around a large doll, her face alight with happiness. When they had finished singing, the young girl looked over at his stark John Timothy Smith inscription, and the smile slid from her face, and a small tear escaped her eye. He watched the tear roll down her cheeks and onto her father’s grave, and he wished he could feel those tears; he wished he could dry those tears, and his soul felt a torment he could not explain.

He watched them leave, and his soul was heavy with regret for what he might have done, could have done, to have given of himself. He felt a longing for the love he saw in the young girl’s eyes and the gentleness he saw in the mother’s face. He wanted just to touch the tear that had escaped the little girl’s eye.

And his soul roved and roamed in its endlessness, but each time came back to the crystal vase with its scented flowers. He felt the love that surrounded the new mound of earth and the father whose remains lay beneath it.

The days and the hours had no meaning to him; they were for the living. In this timeless place, he flew silently past the old and the new gravesides, always weighed down by his emptiness.

The girl returned with her mother many times. Each time she carried flowers, said a prayer and sang a song, and then as she was ready to leave, she turned her small head and read his gravestone again, and a single tear fell. He passed by her, moved around her and, in agony, wanted to comfort her, but his nothingness stopped his every gesture.

His soul began to be filled with pain and an indescribable urge to offer tenderness to the beautiful child he watched. And he could do nothing. His regrets poured over him in excruciating, enveloping waves of pain. His soul writhed at his complacent life, given to no one, helping no one, caring for no one, and his wretched soul began another circuit of the cemetery.

The mother and child came a little less often now to the father’s graveside. Summer became autumn, and he waited longingly throughout the seasons for the ritual they had created. He waited for the child to gaze with such sadness at his tombstone, and he knew each time she looked, she would shed a tear for him.

Winter came, and with it the cold days and less visitors to the gravesites. Now he waited, and waited, his anxiety increasing the pain in his soul, and then, as a small patch of blue sky opened over her father’s grave, he saw them come into the cemetery. How long had she been away? He couldn’t measure time anymore, except by the deep and burning pain he felt.

As she walked in, rugged up in a coat and boots, he flew towards her to stop her slipping on the wet path. This time her hands were full. She carried two bunches of flowers, and her mother carried another beautiful crystal glass vase, just like her father’s vase. He watched with a longing his soul could not fill as she rearranged the new flowers into her father’s vase, and then into the new vase. Quietly she worked and, when satisfied, she asked her mother’s approval, and her mother nodded.

She turned towards his headstone and carefully placed the second vase beside his name. This time when they prayed, she included John Timothy Smith in her prayers, and the sweet rendition of Amazing Grace was directed at both the graves. She sprinkled love over her father’s grave, and somehow, amazingly, she sprinkled some on his.

He felt a change in his soul, a lightness where it had been heavy, and a movement that lifted his soul as though the bonds that had kept it on earth were breaking; his soul began to lift out of the cemetery. As it moved, it began a gentle ascent towards the light above, the ever-enfolding light of eternity, and as he looked back behind him, he promised the little girl he would look after her. For every precious tear you shed for me, there will be a thousand times my wings will guide you and my love will protect you, he prayed over her, and this time as he watched not a single tear