January #4

What Links Us

My neighbour is playing his music.

This afternoon our windows 

are closed against the heat

yet still I hear the heavy pulse

of the drum, of my throbbing blood,

my heartbeat, everyone's heart,

across our dividing courtyard.

This morning I swam

in the hydrotherapy pool.

There was my old friend Irwin, 

stretching his herniated discs.

'I can't do this in the river,' he said,

and I remembered all of us swimming 

with him in his river, years ago.

At Christmas I went back

to the town I grew up in.

The hospital there, where I was born

and my little brother was born,

was also where my Nana, who'd held me
in her lap, died. I was four. 

Now I am 74. I still love her.

The handsome lizard in my kitchen —

how did that get in? — didn't scurry away

but kept very still. I opened the back door

and fetched the broom. Could I

manoeuvre it out? I don't like 

killing the creatures. Oh, but this one

was dead already, a gift from the cat.

Do I put these things before you

as question, answer, or neutral description?

Not to instruct you how to think,

let me just tell you what I imagine:

all the trees of the world messaging each other,

their roots connected through earth 

and their branches sharing the air.

— Rosemary Nissen-Wade