Something To Say

In an old briefcase capsuled for years in a corner of the shed, I found a rolled up wad of poems, stalled, still looking for something to say, frozen in a futile gasp for air. I should have thrown them away. There was also an old plane ticket, a beer coaster from an Antwerp cafe, and a few photographs taken from a bridge across a canal in Bruges with three nuns wearing starched white cornettes stretched out like enormous butterfly wings perched atop of their heads. And tucked in a side pocket, were letters from my mother written more than thirty years ago. Long dead, I could almost hear her voice read each word. In one, she told me how she scored an A for English in the HSC exam she sat when well into her sixties. She could recite Frost's "Birches" off the top of her head. Stevens, for her, made no sense. Mum liked plain language pared down to bone. I am not sure why I am writing these words about such middling matters, much less trying to shape them into poetry. No matter. Sometimes just ordinary things, like those found in an old briefcase, seem to find a moment to have something to say, at least for me.