This poem was written from an apartment in Hunter St, Hobart, where the author was living while her home, recently destroyed by a catastrophic fire, was being rebuilt.

Everywhere I look

it is a lesson in geometry:

triangles of all sizes

rectangular windows

naked, curtained or blinded

round silos now luxurious apartments

spheres on cruisers like diving bells

from a Tintin cartoon book

busy cranes rising to infinity.

It is a lesson in movement:

clouds rush, hesitate and shrivel

gulls soar, drift and plunge

metal butterfly wings in chimneys

flap in the wind and with the sun

play shadows and lights

yachts bob up and down

to the rhythm of the day

tree branches sway.

It is a lesson in autumnal colours.

Reds, browns, blues and greens

from the same painter’s palette

but never quite alike

change with the light.

It is a lesson in textures: roofs

blistered, flaky and corrugated

grooved, ribbed and ironed

glass, smooth and slippery.

From my balcony

everywhere I look

I see a complex design

a man-nature partnership

of ephemeral beauty

that must be observed

celebrated and seized.

Christiane Conesa-Bostock was born in Lyon, France, and came to Australia in the early 1970s. She taught French, English and Spanish at Rosny College. She has written short stories and poems that have been published in Australia, Algeria, France and the US. Her latest publication is a bilingual book of poems about the painter Monet (Kol Sason Press).