What this day needs

This is for you if ― like mine ― your day needs a poem. Well, really, what my day needs is a bevy of friends and a gin and tonic and someone else to put the baby to bed, just for one night. And a walk in the clean, cool air and five minutes to hold together a sense of myself, underneath those pressing roles I hold ― mother, partner, daughter, editor. Anyway, I'm going to yoga, which is a bit like a gin and tonic, but with less garrulous laughter, so really, no, not like a gin and tonic at all. And I went hunting for a poem, then realised, again, that almost all our books are in storage and we really should get a house, if only to have somewhere for bookshelves to go. But my aunt did lend me a book of poems  when we visited, so I flickered through it, and this is what I found.

Quietturn it offlisten to the cicadaslisten to that knock of brancheslisten just to the wind ―here it is, rolling nowlike a pitching wave into the treeserasing the crazed and cross-tracked footprints of staticin what you took for silencelisten to the dry woodcatching, at this perfect moment, in the stovestop, and you'll hear it;the stretch and crack and tickof the thin metal flueexpanding in the heatoh, you are beaten so thinand still the joins hold,still that bloom of warmthopening upmore than enoughand your handsstill feeling the shapeof the kindling, the axe, the tree;the flexingof your own bird-fine bones.

Cate Kennedy, "Quiet", The Taste of River Water (Carlton North, VIC, Australia: Scribe, 2011), p. 36.