THE HOLIDAYS ARE OVER AND MY SEQUEL IS FINISHED.
I hope everyone had a marvelous holiday. We routinely ask that question of people and for the most part, they usually answer ‘yes’. But things can go wrong during the holiday season just as they can at any other time. So for those out there who did not have a particularly good time —-I’m sending YOU A BIG HUG!
Well, here in Australia we are suffering extremely high temperatures after a very dry winter. It seems like a large portion of the country is ablaze. My heart goes out to all those in the fire danger zones and I DO wish the country would get some decent rain.(Who would have thought I’d be saying that, considering all the floods we’ve had in recent summers)
It puts me in mind of Dorothea MacKellar’s poem, ‘My Country’. We learned it in school but I recall only one verse. Therefore, I shall paste it here to jog the memory.
My Country
The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!
The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze …
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
OH! And before I go, HALLELUJAH! I have finished my sequel to Goodbye Junie Moon. Now I have to get it edited so I don’t suppose it will be on Kindle until February. Think I’ll call it ‘Finding Junie Moon’. What do you think? Let me know!
