Friday, August 17, 2007

Under a smiling new moon

Earlier today I caught up with a friend who I hadn't talked to since he and his teenage daughter helped chalk Love Letters at Your Feet during the Mid Winter Arts Festival. He told me that his daughter, when asked what she enjoyed most about chalking poems in Cafler Park, replied: "Seeing Meliors get so excited about it."*

And that reminded me how much I did enjoy it, the memory having been dimmed slightly by the intervening rainy weeks and my new focus on preparing for the Domestic Pilgrimage exhibition in November. Emboldened by no rain all day(!) this evening I spontaneously decided I'd go out with my chalk and write up some fragments of the poems I've been working on for Domestic Pilgrimage. It was pretty dark and I seem to have lost my intuitive judgment of word spacing at speed, but I had fun. If it doesn't rain before dawn there should be a somewhat legible surprise for farmer's market shoppers and library users on Saturday morning.

I wrote a couple of fragments from Do the Dishes which I am making into an artist's book at the moment and a couple of very fresh poemlets:

How gentle we must be
How resilient we are

and

Come back to yourself
you are beautiful
when you are here

*Which made me think about how rare it must be for young people to see adults show uninhibited passion for their work.

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