You’ve got to hand it to Mother Nature, when she sends an east coast low through South East Queensland we all get to feel her might. And that’s what we’ve felt over the past 24 hours as swells reached about 4 metres and winds hit 85-95 knots.

On Friday before the low hit, lots of us raced out for a surf before the swell got out of hand and the forecast nor’easterly gale hit.

The water was glassy and grey.  We played for hours in fun 2 foot waves. And we watched the most astonishing light show in the sky and across the horizon.

Mountainous brooding cumulous piled upon themselves to the heavens. Wherever the sun broke through it shivered across the sea in scattered pathways.

At one stage we couldn’t see approaching waves because the colour of the ocean merged entirely into the sky.

That experience combined with the following 24 hours of howling wind and rain- storm brought back memories of one of the first poems I wrote in about 2008-09 called “blue is the colour of my love”:

in the utter peace of dawn

a world of hanging mist and forest blur

motionless

after night’s mayhem

of tidal-wave winds

and squalling rain flung against shivering windows.

there in deep shadows beneath exhausted trees

is midnight blue

the colour of my love.

silent mystery in pools of exhaled air

gasping, i climb towards the surface

on a ladder of streaming sunlight

and silver webs.

this blue of love is new.

never have I seen such depth and dimension

and all the while the casuarinas flower and lyre birds caroll

colliding in yugambeh-land language.

 

the day was still

poised on a cliff edge

as crows scrawled symbols across the sky.

reading bird talk is an ancient art here

and shadows mark the way.

 

how blue is my love?

as deep as the forest in this silent soil

as vast as the ocean of peace

home is the place my heart now sleeps.

Peace