POETRY JAM - HOMEMADE

“Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odourless but all together perfume the air.” - Georges Bernanos

This week’s Poetry Jam topic is homegrown, homemade, home baked, homespun, home brewed or home cooked. For me “home” equates with peace and quiet, the content of routine and the little joys that most of us tend to overlook because we are accustomed to them and take for granted.

Reading the news lately with so many wars being fought around the globe, reminds how lucky we are to be living in a country at peace, being able to enjoy all of these little things that make our house a happy home. Here is my offering with a hope that peace will soon come to those people. Especially relevant on this Hiroshima Day…

Peace

It is the laughter of children playing outside my window,
The smell of baking in the kitchen and the larder full.
It is the hurrying steps of a returning labourer,
Content with a full day’s work, eager to come home.

It is the fields that bloom, the grain ripening in the sun,
The cows dozing as they chew their cud.
It is my love in her summer dress reading her book
Under the shade of a green-leaf tree.

It is the sound of music drifting down the empty street
As dancing couples whirl in the town hall.
It is the two adolescents that kiss beneath a full moon
While the crickets chirp in approbation.

It is the careless saunter late at night,
The lights left on inside the house, burning like beacons.
It is the sound of airplane engines in the sky,
Stirring only thoughts of distant exotic places and carefree holidays.

It is a rusty rifle driven into the earth to support a growing vine,
An old soldier’s helmet, now home to a budding flower.
It is the surety of watching your children surviving you,
The swelling pregnant belly and the double-joy of grandchildren.

Peace: It is a quietude and a celebration of the commonplace,
An all-increasing accumulation of small delights that add up to bliss.
Peace, it is a multiplicity of contentments and a realisation
Of what humankind has the capability of being.

(The painting above is by Australian Artist Frederick McCubbin: “Winter Evening, Hawthorn” – 1886)