'Now, make sure you've sterilised those instruments well. I want no complications with this one,' I say to my rookie assistant.

I carefully lay out the gleaming stainless-steel blades and check that all is in order. We're waiting on a last minute ***** donation to complete the procedure and although the timing is unorthodox, I'm confident of success. The pleural resection should be reasonably straightforward. If anything, it's the closure that bothers me...and the possibility of problems further down the line.

From outside comes the sound of a vehicle screeching to a halt. Then the kitchen door bursts open. 'Mommy, Mommy, we got it! The last one.' My six-year old holds the bag of chicken giblets up triumphantly. I smile at my father as he appears with the rest of the Thanksgiving groceries and passes them to my son. 'Right, so who's going to help me stuff this bird?'

It was going to be the trip of a lifetime. Sydney, Cairo, Constantinople, maybe even Jerusalem if there was time and breath left in us. We came from the far-flung reaches of the earth to the bustling capitals of the Middle East. Just me, my good mates -  Blue, Grim and his cousin Frank - our chaperone Sergeant Major O’Donnell, and 1,500 other lads of the 1st Australian Light Horse Brigade.

Frank copped it at Gallipoli, never even set foot on the beach. I left him screaming on the metal deck of the landing craft awash with ***** and blood as he watched his innards unfurl. ****** oath, they stunk! Like ten-day-old snags left out in the Adelaide sun. His Mum always said she’d have his guts for garters if he enlisted underage. I reckon she’d never use that expression again. She was a nice lady too, that Mrs Gibson.

Tell me, fair dinkum, what do 18-year-old, daring-do dreamers from Parramatta know of the chain of high command, a war of geopolitical strategy and stiff upper lips. The bewhiskered gentlemen who manoeuvre their pieces in imperial map rooms will live to fight another day, and yet hold their fallen troops accountable for the unpredictable tides of history.

Grim took Frank’s death hard. From that day on his war was one explosive suicide mission. In the end, he walked into a spray of Turkish gunpowder at Chunuk Bair. The Distinguished Conduct Medal he earned that day sits on my mantelpiece beside a photo of the four of us at Giza. His sister Molly, my dear sweet Molly, turned out to be the love of my life. Funny how that happens - the threads that hold us together, the ties that bind brothers, the strangers who become our saviours.

The sergeant major succumbed to typhoid fever in Palestine and that left Blue and me. We sit and remember. We laugh at the horror during the day and shiver in our beds at night. We wage war with ourselves, our choices, our victories and defeats. We marvel at the world and the territorial ambition of nations, shake our heads at the repetition of dumb history, and raise our wavering fists to those same men in their ivory towers. It’s in all the newspapers that the Vietnam conflict is this generation’s Dardanelles Campaign. ‘A vain and protracted engagement fought in a topographically hostile arena with disproportionate loss of life’ is what I read. Yet wonder of wonders, a Yank - Blue knows his name...but I forget...Neville Someone - walked on the moon last month. Do y’reckon we helped to make that happen? Four cobbers from New South Wales, who had a knack with horseflesh and a taste for kangaroo feathers, on an adventure which spanned more lifetimes than I could ever have imagined.

The opposite of end-stopped
Poetry; the trick with enjambment
Is to never complete a sentence, phrase, or thought
Within a single line of verse; but instead allow
The syntactic unit to run on
Unexpectedly, like a distracted self-drive tourist
Attempting to navigate a multi-lane freeway
Without indicating

I am Bic Pentameter
Bic Pentameter is my name
Rhythm is my business
Time management is my game

Short, Long & Sons employ me
To tidy up their verse
The satirists are not too bad
But Catullus is a curse

I have danced with Sappho
Brought Shakespeare home for tea
Swapped pretty tales with Byron
Bounced da Padova on my knee

Marlowe picked a fight for nought
Auden spiked my drink
Wordsworth was insomnolent
He never slept a wink

Yeats, now there's an anecdote
Worthy of the press
The critic's choice by all accounts
The brightest and the best

But listen to me prattling on
To my work I must attend
Performance, prosody, poesy
The rules of scansion do not bend

For metre is all important
When reciting off by heart
The classic works of yesteryear
And I shall play my part

Write what you know
Paint what you see
Yourself is much more int’resting
Than whoever you pretend to be

Sing what you hear
Move how you must
Look not to other’s favour
In yourself you may trust

Create and inspire
Astound and amuse
Yourself is an instrument
Go ahead - play what you choose!

A velvet topography,
Of ridges and furrows,
Undulations of light and shade,
A land born of upheaval,
And tectonic collisions,
With a fault line for a spine.

My inkwell brims with verse unfit,
My speech tongue-tied; my page unwrit,
Yet though I be misunderstood,
Prefer I this to words of wood.

This morning I awoke with a cluster of words resting in the palm of my hand, my fingers tracing their gentle form like the decades of a rosary. On the tip of my tongue a song, a story, a fable of experience, existence, and eternity lay dozing.

There I floated between my inner and outer worlds, an exquisite confluence of wakeful consciousness and drowsy carelessness, until daybreak shook the last of sleep from my tousled dreams and my verses disintegrated like dust into the ether. It was at that moment, when the cool breeze through the open window intervened and the thrum of traffic in the distance drew me out from beyond the covers, that I lost my poem.

I know it will return: as droplets of rain on window glass, or as threads of loose cotton on a frayed cushion cover, in the rhythm of a lazy Sunday afternoon, or in the sigh of the ocean’s flow. All of these are mesmerising in their effect, some intangibly soulful, others enticingly tactile. All are enough to quiet the chatter of the quotidian mind and allow the delicate operations of the creative imagination to reign.

Only then, will I attempt to commit my words to paper...and you shall read them here.

At this time of year,
it seems that everyone
is looking for a piece of blue sky
with a little bit of green;

Among the frazzle and the dazzle,
the trash and the tinsel,
a piece of themselves
that they misplaced;

Down the back of the sofa,
back in the day
when blue sky grew on trees
and green summers were forever.

’Ego sum hic.’

Calling to the dawn,
Baying at the moon,
Petitioning the horizon,
Summoning the faithful;

The yearning indefinite,
In pursuit of an enduring affirmative;
An echo searching for its source
In the boundless beyond.

’Ibi tu es, tu es, tu es, tu es...‘

I am sand - drifting formlessly, settling briefly;
dusting edges traced clean by housekeeping’s judicious forefinger.

I am sand - black with iron and ****** wrath;
shattering glassily against a wine-stained ceiling.

I am sand - my trespasses turned to pearl;
rippled and flurrying, wedged between sandal-clad toes.

I am sand - porous with desire yet disarmed by possibility;
a fortress on the brink of invasion by the sea.

I am sand - recalled to the desert, claggy with melancholy;
a loping caravan of travail, westward bound.

I am sand - measureless and infinitely uncontainable;
sifting from hour to hour...and life to life.

They wear their bodies inside-out, some are ashes but few are dust. Vacant orbits, oblivious to the incoming tide and the percussive artillery from the heavily fortified positions on Rue de la Mort, view the world with equanimity. Their bloodied stillness at odds with the surrounding tumult.

It’s at times like these - pinned down behind a burnt-out vehicle, the sand skipping around me with the phut-phut-phut of spent rounds - that I envy them their final freedom. Not that all deaths are as elegant and instantaneous as a well aimed bullet to the head.

It is a fleeting thought, hardly even that, a whispering somewhere in the background of my consciousness, like listening to a low-tuned wireless. And with victory as with defeat - with the ear-ringing silence - the whisperings become louder and more persistent.

Right, left; up, down; stop, wait; walk, run; sink, swim; live, die. Some pray to survive, other’s yearn for the sweetspot, the one shot ****. Regardless, there is no doubt that we who remain will fight on for weeks, for years, for decades and continue to live the uncertainty of the living - sweating bullets until kingdom ****** come.

to be
to yearn
to love
to learn
to live
to linger
to leave

We burrow where they lie, our fallen brothers. Old sweats and fledgling crow bags, both. In death as in life, they have our back…and so we plough on into the abyss by the light of a caged phosphorus flare, hot metal spraying the midnight hour like some vengeful fay’s buckshot.

A human scaffold supports us for the distance of four miles. That’s Piccadilly to Hampstead; Circus to Heath. The length of a lifetime…of  hundreds of lifetimes. In the winter when the rains come and the trenches run like a quartermaster’s latrine, the soil sloughs away to reveal the ossuary within. It is then that I, in my now customary delirium, imagine that I can reach out to shake their hand again.

Swinging rhythmically; bloated and unsteady,
He nudges at the doorway of his desire,
And descends into darkness,
Carrying his heavy load of lust.

Beyond the bottleneck,
From where warmth and light beckon,
He hears the trill of girlish laughter,
The sound of sanctuary at play.

Pausing briefly; head cocked to one side,
He sighs with resignation,
Deposits his craving clumsily,
And withdraws deflated and defeated.

Once again.

I’m wearing your old jacket. Remember? The one you used to fish in. The one with the tear in the silk of the right-hand pocket. You used to tease me. You used to say that this jacket kept your loose change safe from my chocolate addiction. You being left-handed; me being right.

I bury my face in the nap of the moleskin collar. My nostrils fill with your scent - stale cologne, a hint of woodsmoke, and...fish. More disconcerting than unpleasant, it’s all I can do not to choke on my memories of you. Of me and you. Together.

'Tell me, how can I be, now that you alone are gone and I am left behind?'

I feel like I’ve been abandoned in a foreign capital with nothing more than the clothes I stand up in and a wallet full of the wrong kind of currency. The day is drawing to a close. My luggage has disappeared with the exhaust from the bus which took off before I could catch my breath and explain my dilemma - that I’m not sure where I’m going or even where I’ve been. Lately.

Maybe a kindness will point me in the right direction. An open-all-hours diner on an inner-city corner, snuggled in between the high-rise office blocks. Maybe I’ll have enough cash for a meal and a trail of hot, sweet tea to lead me into tomorrow. Maybe I’ll close my eyes and remember where I’m supposed to be and what I should be doing.

And just maybe, as the rhythm of the traffic slows and the night progresses, I’ll find some peace in the ever-changing cityscape. A time-lapse production of late revellers, harried shift workers, the dispossessed and restless; until finally the earliest commuters and exercise fanatics emerge from the riverside neighbourhoods to face the new dawn.

‘Hey, lady.’ A disgruntled voice shatters my reverie. 'I ain’t got all day, y’know.' Scrambling for cash, I reach deep into your left-hand pocket and find...***...a limp fifty-dollar bill...and a battered envelope. There’s a note scrawled on the outside in your familiar hand:

'How can you be, now that I alone have gone and you are left behind? The short answer is: you will be. For you are as singular and complete today as you were before 'mine' became 'yours' and 'I' became 'we'. My darling, I’m no tourist. You know how impatient I can get - always taking the most direct route. I’m just out of sight around the next corner. You take your time and meet me when you’re ready. Sometime...later. Whenever. I’ll be waiting.'

Stunned, I mutter an apology to the waitress and step out from the warm fug of the café into a bright, fresh New York morning. The doorbell tings shut behind me and I realise with new-found clarity that I know exactly where I am. I’m home. It’s not going to be a great day but it’ll be a better one, which is a start. Besides I have things to do - chocolate to buy, a jacket to launder, and a needle to thread.

Flavia swore as the heavy earthenware pitcher slipped from her hands and crashed onto the uneven flagstones. As she knelt in the puddle of tepid water and started gathering in the pieces, she heard the rapidly approaching footfall of an armed legionary.

‘Leave that now, there’s no time. We ride for York immediately.’
‘But mea domina...’
‘The Wall is breached. Hurry, puella, or she'll start without you!’

Flavia picked up her sodden skirts and ran.

                                                           ­  §

I held my breath as the last piece of the Corbridge ewer slid smoothly into place and wondered at the exquisitely crafted motif which encircled the body of this ancient vessel. A procession? A cavalcade? Curious, if not for the men-at-arms, I would have thought it a pageant. And there in a covered wagon a noble woman looking back at a young girl standing on the steps of a villa holding her hem in her hands.

Shhh...

Do you hear that sound?
The strains of distant music
Do you recognise the tune?
The way you used to sway to its rhythm
Do you know the words?
It’s an old favourite

Listen
And remember

Robert told Olive
And Olive told Dee
That Emma likes Peter
But Peter likes me.

And Stephen saw Jamie
Tell Anna and George
That Vicky kissed Edward
And Clarence kissed Maude.

But Peter told Edward
And Edward told me
That Vicky saw Stephen
Tell Clarence and Dee

That Robert kissed Emma
So Anna told George
That Olive likes Jamie
But Jamie likes Maude

Her thoughts, gathered on the in-breath, are misplaced on the out-.

As her memories float free of their moorings, ninety summers fill the late-afternoon room with a kaleidoscope of people and places: a young girl in a home-made dress plays tag with her brother in a Provençal orchard; a dark-haired teenager waits at a station fiddling with the yellow star pinned to her cardigan; a Milanese tailor embroiders freshwater pearls onto a snow white wedding bodice; and - over by the window - a dashing young cavalry officer, with eyes which reflect my own, stands in the shade of a blue jacaranda.

‘J'ai oublié,’ she whispers as I nuzzle her cheek goodbye.

You may have forgotten, Bubbe, but I have not the stories you have told me.