Predawn: the early risers amplify the darkness with noisy combustion.  Cheerful magpies greet the morning with surrounding warble; momentarily silenced by faraway cockatoos screaming expletives.  My breath, not unlike the slow-moving fog beneath the darkened trees, rolls before me in tendrils. A fresh, hot, milky coffee warms my winter-weathered hands. Blackened windows of nearby houses randomly spark alight with morning activity. Each waking home ushers a deep thrum followed by a slow-stirring hiss as heated water collects and flows like warm lifeblood through the pipe work. I sit, westerly, watching as the sun begins to illuminate colour into the world from behind me. The cloud-blanketed sky is heavy overhead, appearing still and unmoving. Wet leaf-litter, sodden with the night’s rainstorm, has collected around me in a carpet of muted yellows and washed-out browns.  Now, later-rising native bird life, each unmistakably different, pepper the world in lively chorus. I wriggle my toes in my old but delightfully warm moccasins. My coffee, now too cold, offers my hands no reprieve from their winter-weatheredness and so I keep them tucked tightly in my lap. It is a white world, this late July morning; with its slow-rolling grey clouds in sun-dappled, radiant silver. It is here, in this crisp new day surfacing, I close my eyes to better-listen. It is meditative, the sounds of Winter, and I am reminded as I quite often am at the sun’s rise, just how glorious it is to be alive.

I have a black God
who, at times, leads me lost
without tether, without reason
without return.
The summoning,
comes from an empty place
of dark pools
in which no light can escape.
Where silken glass shards,
lay scattered down below;
the remnants of a shattered heart
like forgotten confetti
once adorned,
in dark ceremony –
the very making
of this tragedy.