One Evening we were returning from Southport on the Gold Coast and we stopped at small jetty to watch the moom rise. Suddenyl all around us the water around us sparkled with glow worm like creatures everywhere in the water.This recollection inspired Michaels lovely poem:

Green fish

I came to see Ian
I am, he is, we were
The paradigm of friendship from the days before sex determined all
And now he will die before I do.

Desultory but determined
We spent some time
Talking randomly, just being really, the way we ever were
And he remembered the green fish.

Phosphorescence was all it was
Though at the time a marvel.
Of course it was life that was the marvel, his and mine, two eyes
Spinning through the world like a tandem.

There’s more. Must be,
Our lives colliding like billiard balls
Over a huge felt green so long enclosed by rubbery limits near sixty years
that to my sad eye now admits no bitter moment,

But we don’t have the time.


Michael, 23/3/2007

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Michael's Aunties were the were smoutherly, motherly types that oozed affection, droolness and visual puppy dog eyes attention as you greeted them. They would do anything for you. Michael found other sides to them as his stories will tell you, but to me they were the archetypal smoother you to their breast types flopping about in slippers at midday.

See his stories of them at his site as linked below.