Today the clouds are heading at me on stiff breezes out of the east. Winter is coming…I can feel the change. It’s mid-autumn here. March, April, and May are precursors to the winter months: June, July, August. It’s still a challenge to wrap my head around the backward and upside-down reality of living in the southern hemisphere.
As if to herald the new season, one that is more inspired and prolific than the past three months have been, I woke up in the night with a sentence in my head. It’s a great sentence…so great that I got up out of a dead sleep, turned on the light, found pen and paper and wrote it down. Here it is in all it’s brilliance:
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The moments exist in picture without story, devoid of memory, bone minus flesh.
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Now you tell me, is that or is that not a great sentence?! Too bad I have to be asleep to come up with such artistry. But I know exactly where it belongs in the memoir so I’m turning there now, to plug in that literary bit.
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But before I go, I scribbled a poem recently. Maybe you’ll enjoy…
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EIGHT DEGREES SOUTH OF THE EQUATOR
I crack an eyelid.Through east facing windows
the ink of night
pales at the horizon.
A rooster crows,
then another.
Without warning,
summoned by their cry,
a fringe of coral
singes jagged palms and rooftops,
shoots to ragged clouds.
The sky explodes in color,
softens and is gone.
Tropic sun crawls heavenward,
drags relentless heat
through daylight hours
then slips into decline,
slight breezes in its wake.
No lingering twilight.
A dog barks.
It’s night.
That’s how it happens here
eight degrees south of the Equator.
March 29, 2015
Sherry Bronson
writing for self-discovery 
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