Full Poem by Etienne Charilaou

How many realise that the apexes of life can be found doing ordinary things like reading a comic book outside on a Sunday afternoon? The white-breasted crow caws from the top of the Christmas tree on the neighbour's side, and is heard by another crow some houses distant who returns the call. A small, excited conversation ensues. It's balmy and still and I've sustained two mosquito bites already. I shoo the bloodsuckers away knowing they'll be back. The lizard, two big steps away, behind my chair is quite at rest on his backfolded forearms lying limp against the tile. Other birds flit past amid trees and skies in ‘silent meditation', a stillness betokening - words fail, what I can say! It's still a mystery hidden to me. Perhaps it always will be? White cloud behind the fuzzy tree, bee buzzing around a dying rose, white sedan-type car goes past and up our road - it's the usual state of affairs, but it's always different, and yet the scene is persistently the same, and I look as I'm wont to do, always captivated by natural beauty, even with its majesty constrained perhaps by suburbia. Only the trees and the sky of infinite blue depths, the masking sculptures of clouds, and, of course, the sun's overpowering radiance that cannot be looked upon directly for fear of blindness, let us know that Nature is really immense, and that small gardens diminish that grandeur though still forming part of the whole, and reflect it like a hologram does. And I am compelled after turning from these sights to look again...as though I've missed something significant.