Anna Couani #133 Sunday (nod to RV)

Sunday quiet has fallen in our neck of the woods

although there are reassuring noises not far off

meaning sounds of life

rather than deathly silence

and the absence of lawns spares us

the weekend lawnmowers

just a few high flying planes

the odd helicopter

otherwise its just the occasional gate

opening and neighbours chatting

gives us space to think

to process the week’s events

how one professor said that Australian literature

is a migrant literature

all except Aboriginal

has that sense of isolation

and alienation

of finding the environment strange

and the other professor said that

English is a precise language

not woolly like Greek

maybe not as evocative

gave the example of thalassa

meaning sea

for me those esses suggest waves

and in Greek has that incommensurability

even though the Mediterranean is so much smaller

than the Pacific

and one Aboriginal word is garrigarrang

which suggests the square sandstone cliffs

of our east coast

the symmetry of the north and south heads

of Port Jackson

Garungal and Burra Wara