Another World

Bandung, Java

I sip sweet tea on the balcony
and watch the day unfold way across the valley,
a visitor slowing to the breath of an alien land.
Squares of cloth white yellow and red
flap and flutter on lines against mud brick huts;
an ox is tethered nearby.

Suddenly from behind a curved wall a hoer appears
ankle deep in the sectioned rice field;
then two more, like flies on a windscreen.
I blink and there are six, just popped up
out of the very earth as though
they’d been playing ‘hidey’ in the grass.
Long-legged birds reflected in the water
stalk in the wake of the hoers.

Long ago in my childhood the days passed
with just such repetitious simple acts;
a framework that held my life in place
as I did my round of chores, quietly
to the occasional chorus of hens and cows
and a barking dog.

Ros Schulz spent her childhood in the Barossa Valley and Murray Mallee, before settling in Adelaide. Along with raising a family of four, she was a high school teacher for 12 years in country South Australia and Adelaide, and for a further year in London; she also spent 15 years as a TAFE lecturer in Communication Studies. With both poetry and prose pieces in South Australian and interstate publications, she has been a long-term member of Adelaide’s Friendly Street Poets and a regular contributor to its anthologies.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.

Photo: Johan Wieland/flickr