Wellington Washes 13th November

Wellington almost windless
waves a deep green blue lilting lightly
reducing rowers, lightly rocking
Yellow hulls like gulls’ bills….

Red-billed gulls ‘socking it’ to
Black-billed others, despite
greater numbers, sure-footed

on the shoreline

Red-billed victors rowdy soar

Pigeon clusters meet in the marram
raiding Waitangi Park’s bounty
they huddle and mutter all aflutter

Tui atop a Norfolk pine
mocks a bird sculpture calls
to the cafe folk

Gazing out on a bridge strutted with holes
locks clipped holding mesh against waves’
myriad laps at the timbers of piles

still standing as tramping feet freely
move and scoot, slide or cycle

Above -grey clouds, below footsteps clip,
strut, pause, stop.

Overhead in those clouds a plane
is snarling lowering
lights like dragon-eyes
over Balena Bay, blinking;
cumulus fondling
the bush of the hills.

A ticket upon the water,
A Dragon in the sky

Surcease, a cafe feast soda
Pomegranate with pink straw
orange slices, a carnival
complemented by chocolate cake
hazelnuts eyeing the sky

below, surfers crest waves
falter, arms outflung…are swallowed
by the Sea
then spat out, up onto the shore

Waves ripple, finger-fumble the sand
shells tumble, cake’s eaten
birds hover agape for crumbs
from this visual feast.

Juliana Venning

Watercolours recently

Igor and friends

A book about who a bumble bee might meet, in my garden. A daily visitor is a thrush, who pecks up the lawn, loves a bath and a flush,swish of his feathers then off to raid plum trees nearby.

Magpie and Rata the tricks to find the bee!

Flightless, yes, flights of fancy true. Loving doing pictures for mokopuna.

If you saw a bee up close you too might recoil, eyes wide! Moko said ‘Oh no, the cat’s not going to eat the bee?” I reassured her it was an amicable ‘stand off’.

poem – Remembering New Orleans

Remembering New Orleans, colours, the heat,

mules plodding sun-hatted flowers tucked behind twitching ears

as I hear our weather “snow to 300 metres”

Wairarapa – means water/sun place –

but it is windswept, isolate, a world away from sultry jazz,

strolling listening,eating sweet treat beignets,

a snowfall of sweetness.

Levees and light, oil flares –

us into arguments, discussions about life/water scarcity

the local environment- Mississippi too

I am remembering the oil search markers in the bayou

Heron swept,flight above oil flares

on the river.

I recall the disasters, Katrina, the Gulf.

New Orleans, a scintillating tidal-city

en-Gulf-fired, flooded

French-slave traded, Spanish-infiltrated

Andrew Jackson-liberated.

I miss the cobbled streets

latticed balconies, seeing swallows swift on warm nights

now I am abed, cold, in the Wairarapa.

it’s also windswept, isolate a world away from sultry jazz

stroitlling eating sweet-treat beignets a