Once a month the doctor visits.
She makes her trip inland, driving from
her coastal town to our village
hidden in the hills.

Here, people rarely get sick.
They say whatever's carried in the wind
stops them getting dizzy in the heat.
They believe in the hills,
gifted with sweet smelling herbs
waiting for the miracle of alchemy
to transform them into oils, infusions,
syrups and decoctions-
feverfew for headaches, fennel for digestion,
lavender for dreaming.
The doctor's young,so has an open mind.
Never critical, she's always willing to listen.

Most days, she's woken by the ocean
on its way to demolish the dunes.
Dragged back by an invisible force,
it roars in frustration, straining
like a tethered beast demanding
to do what it pleases.
But Earth won't allow it just yet
and the ocean knows who's in charge,
the rules will change only when She decides.

The doctor's irritated.
She can't see the ocean any more,
her view's obscured by unfinished business-
silent carcasses of half-built villas.
She can taste the salt.
Feeling trapped, she would like to find shelter
in another skin.

But today, her cure is in the hills.
At her door, she waits for the mist to lift.
It whispers there are other choices.
To unlock another door while she still has time.

                     *

In each on of us there survives an intuitive preference
for all things natural. The great continuum of life that
contains and sustains us.

copyright © Caroline Grace 2014

Through this monumental city
a troubled river runs under an ancient bridge.
It's hardly flowing.
There's just enough depth to reflect
the accumulation of discarded waste -
the sum of man's detritus.

At its edge, a man stretches his legs
over long shadows
cast by a line of Jacarandas.
These are his invisible boundaries.
He believes if he stepped out of their shade
he would sink back into the quicksand of his past.

It was easy for him to give up.
He just slipped through a gap to where
the source of an old torment was quite forgotten.

This is where he spends his day.
On the hour precisely, with a regular bell for measure
absorbed in silent calculations,
counting and recounting the length of his existence-
a short span between life and certain death.

He's too busy to notice a sanctimonious world
taunting from its own
'He's not all there' it whispers,
'he's in a foreign place.'

But it doesn't put him off his stride.
He's miles away on a carpet of heavenly blue
tethered to a dream,
where mocking birds fly over his head,
and his dog, streets ahead, barks urgently
waiting for him to catch up.


copyright © Caroline Grace 2014

I don't know why your voice was so near and you were not.
I turned as in a dream to listen,
but your fragmented words scattered in the wind.
Far side of the garden,  I caught  you crush the grieving lilies,
hand raised as if to say goodbye.
Or was it there to shield your eyes against a blinding light,
that took you with the moon behind the hill?

Where did you go that I could not follow?

Loneliness obscures all reason, refuses truth,
that is to say-
when you are lost, nothing is clear.

Transfixed but strangely calm,
I waited for your backward glance,
your promise of return,
an explanation.
Then from the light, you reached to cast a silver thread,
that one redeeming ray of hope that drew me closer to the truth.

copyright © Caroline Grace 2014

You humans, who suffer your own judgement, tremble
from the threat of thunder over the earth.
You, who stand in authority over all things,
enslaved by belief, have yet to enter our language.

You are a broken instrument
locked in the key of non-comprehension,
a three-stringed violin,
you cannot play our music.

A song of joy filters through our species.
It glitters beneath your heels,
weaves itself through networks of blanched roots,
rippling like a silent scream.

Come closer! We beckon with our arms to greet,
but as with your ancients, the waves simply slacken and die,
proof that the bond between us dissipated
with your evolution of misguided contempt.

Beyond the sun's final blaze
we will become larger than our stilted shadows,
be the final ***** of acid under your skin.
That bright current between us
will dawn on you too late as we proceed to
undermine the remnants of your eyes,
the organs of your narrow vision.


copyright © Caroline Grace 2014

This is where it almost blew us away.
Where stunned silence gave way to
chainsaws and sirens,
where a whole community rolled up
its chequered sleeves in solidarity,
brought tractors and barrows,
ladders and axes and enough rope
to pull it all together.

(we've seen it all on screen)

It split bare trees.
Some lay paralysed,
varicosed roots flung skywards.
Others, headless, fixed like totems
gave a new slant of light to the polished cobbles.

Some were touched, others not.
Some cursed God's reasoning,
others sure of scientific fact.
The abyss did not divide them.

Peace coincided with the setting sun.
The wailing of sirens and chainsaws gave way
to the sound of unadulterated joy.
(Earth allows these moments-
they are her children.)

In a battle of strength, small hands
locked in solidarity, made way for life.
Straining against an opposing force,
tugging on a rope
where the trick is to stay grounded,
to hold on and not let go.

copyright © Caroline Grace 2014

Mine was a clean house,
a free, open house
with no restrictions, no frontiers,
naturally landscaped as far as one could see.

For you it was not enough.
You got bored with the view,
took advantage of my kindness.

You defiled my path.
You **** in my rivers,
polluted my sky with your chemical smell.
You tampered with my cooling apparatus,
now the sun can't bounce back.

But talking to you is a waste of time.
You just sit back and sneer,
filling your pockets with stolen hope.

It's too late for a second chance.
You've ****** it up!
Now go find me a brush!

copyright © Caroline Grace 2014

You hoped for a mansion
but all you got was a ruined house,
abandoned, without care.
It was not what you expected.

A kind of wildness has crept into you-
unpredictable, you have become too slippery for me.

But I'm not concerned with that right now.
I'm too intent on pressing my nose to the window,
fogging the glass with my breath,

(Weird how this cracked pane bends the light)

trying to decipher your contours
as you snake away in stony silence,

halting abruptly at the iron gate
where the grazing pasture seems greener,
much sleeker than your own.

Someday soon, you'll give up your crazy meanderings.
Heed my words!
But not yet-
not until I shatter you.

copyright © Caroline Grace 2014