By Sandshoe.

I remember a green tree frog and the way it impacted my senses in Port Moresby, when I am anyway from a part of the world where green is falling off a log, like night is day, like …

The frog is mine in remembered emeraldness, and I remember the sight at Hidden Valley of the spiders’ webs linking the blades of molasses grass, the entire view on each side of the track other than sky as children and I topped the hill on the climb to the school bus and in the middle of each web was a gleaming emerald green dot, causing a shimmering. Hidden Valley is a outlying settlement of Kuranda where I have sometimes lived in North Queensland.

Yellow is a colour I cannot wear. It shocks me on myself. Anything yellow impacts and takes me to a place I wonder about, yet know nothing of. It vibrates on a bucket and I extract a deep blue bucket instead from a neighbouring stack on a shop stand.

To A Mouse.
On turning her up in her nest with the plough, November 1785.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murdering pattle.

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An’ fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

(Robert Burns 25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796)