I like to use my imagination. Below are some examples of my poetry and prose.
This is a poem for children that I wrote at the beginning of 2005. The inspiration was simply that my cousin's daughter, Mikayla, was growing up and learning to enjoy reading.
A rabbit who lived up an elephant's trunk
Was feeling extremely displeased
With the effort it took just to clean out the gunk
Whenever the elephant sneezed.
So she looked all around for the optimal place
For which she had started to hope
But was offered just one, which was not in good taste -
Being deep down a crocodile's throat.
Well, I couldn't live there, thought the rabbit, because
There are too many teeth at the door.
I might as well stay in the trunk where I was
And put up with cleaning the floor.
But later the elephant stopped by the moat
And the crocodile bit off a chunk
So the rabbit is now in the crocodile's throat
As well as the elephant's trunk.
In 1999, I completed a creative writing topic at Flinders University, called "The Craft and Culture of Creative Writing". The following were all originally written for that topic, though they may have been modified since.
One of the exercises was to write about an event in our childhood from both our own perspective as described in the first person and from someone else's perspective as described in the third person. I wrote about the time my family visited Ayres Rock and central Australia in general. Later I modified this, weaving the two perspectives together with a third strand, which is entirely fictional. The story is partly fact, partly fiction, and the protagonist is partly the real me, partly a fictional me. It's called Beyond the Climb.
Another exercise was to write a poem about the process of writing poetry. I came up with the one called Formation.
I also wrote some haiku.
One about the pleasure of a warm summer night's walk.
In the company
of summer's silent darkness,
I walk invited.
One about memories of living in Scotland as a child and eating the snow.
Falling on the ground
winter's soft, crunchy icing -
a childhood pleasure.
One about what happened when my younger sister decided to play in the rain soon after we returned to Australia. She was expecting light Scottish rain, but was soon inside again, making the amusing remark commemorated here.
Her first Australian
storm; my sister declaring,
"This rain is wet!"
More of my writings from over the years can be found on my blog. Here are some pointers: