Waiting

Waking night, now, and the stars are surprisingly crisp and hard. The first quarter moon riding northerly is also a bright, cold white I haven't seen for years. Each distant sun in Orion is steadier, clearer - and I wonder where the pattern of the year has gone?

For this late autumn has been a strange one, so far. Too much rain, fierce thunderstorms complete with tree-lashing wind and cracking lightning, and the Cosmos was in bloom too early.

This year, I don't care to predict, with my colleagues, a cold winter or a hard one - I don't know what to think. Surely, the ants have been busy inside the house and out, but the trees are still mostly fully-clothed and the vegetation is still lush. You should see my lawn - I mean you should see the bloody thing. Green as a garter, growing fast.

I'm thinking tonight of those hard, bright stars. And of the awesome song of the Pied Wagtail in the mornings. And of the lone House Martin or two, left behind in Africa, still performing aerobatics in the chill-now-dry-now-wet air of the northern suburbs. And of the Sparrows who nested for so long in the ridiculously topiaried Cape Ash trees of Melrose Arch: now gone, who knows where?

And of the beautiful dream I had on Thursday night in which I bled from my womb, and how it is indeed coming to pass - that I'm bleeding, but from some other internal organ and that I'm not afraid. No, not even a little.

And of how I've been catching figures of light from out the corner of my eye for a moon's span now, and of how easily I'm succumbing to pure vertigo in the daytime.

And of how I may appear to be a silly, foolish older woman with dramatic tendencies, but yet I know that this sky, these birds, those stars, this moon - how can you over dramatise these?

And I am at Peace, again and forever, waiting, without counting, for whatever it is may come.