To celebrate the release of The Wattle Tree in August, author John Bell and I will be doing a series of creative exercises over the next week or so. Each day, we spend half an hour responding to a theme. Our first them was “The Storm”. Here is my response.

Here is John Bell’s response to the theme:

The Storm

There is a breeze,
enough to stir the ferns
and the trees’ shaggy heads –
like mops upended
in a child’s pretending,
bobbing with a squeaky voice.

There is one narrow gum
that sways, even in this,
its skinny trunk all height, a line.
Yet it survived the big one,

the storm they still talk about,
that made the bush sparse,
that put
clear intervals of ground
between each tree.

Our yard is
littered
with the felled, cut up for kindling;
a great water tank
rolled like a toy
to its spot of abandonment,
a dent in its side.

It is the skinny juvenile
that survived all this,
that holds its place, swaying.