Poetry

Returning Home by Antoinette Lyons

Free from the need to make purposeful and productive the slackness of mid life,
the pattern of the day is
my own devising.
The quiet task of finding my own bearings.

A compass needle points me to my childhood.
Our little garden.
Sitting on the path,
And all the world is there.
The sun slanting in.
Colours bleached like old Kodak photos.
Wind-rimed sheets snapping from my
Mother’s hands in the breeze.
Neighbours’ voices carrying some domestic urgency.
Beetles are busy bustling.
Warm stones fuzzy with lichen
White, grey, yellow.
Radio in the kitchen and the window ajar.

Now steering through dangers from the unseen and unheard,
my nervous hand steadies.
The child magnetically draws me to the cardinal points of my life,
to the mysteries of rock plant insect home.