🌞   🌛
John Arthur Nichol

  • Just a crack allows Putin the floor.
    All he needs is a foot in the door.
    So a Wimbledon tent,
    An Olympic event,
    Give a tacit thumbs-up to his war.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • May Putin, whose targeting’s vague,
    Dwell in darkness with bucket and plague,
    And, for all of his crimes,
    Live in interesting times,
    Which they’re certain to be in the Hague.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • An event meant to limit his years,
    Is for Putin, the sum of all fears;
    So the Night of the Dome
    Isn’t playing at home,
    Cause it might give his people ideas.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • A Confusion of Angles

    Looking through the balustrade and supports of a 19th Century carved sandstone staircase from close-up. The top railing is massive, carved and fluted, echoing the sharp upwards angle of the sandtone base. Between them, each upright is a squat pillar carved into a shape like a chess piece, a queen or a rook, perhaps, with broad rectangles, narrow lips and delicate, flowing curves. Their mirror image uprights are visible beyond slate-grey steps whose edges are painted white, and through the gaps the planes of a sandstone building and its windows disrupt the symmetry of the columns. In the foreground a single, browning leaf lies curling between two uprights.

    Sydney Town Hall, Druitt Street

  • Two older women walk past and they’re gone, leaving a snatch of conversation in their wake:

    ‘Anyway Kerry, unbeknownst to me …’

  • A pigeon wobbles towards me on the wind, wings extended, undercarriage locked in place.

  • An older woman crosses the road, the wind at her back and the sun in her face. She wears a baseball cap and sunglasses, and a short turquoise dress beneath a black jacket; black leggings and ankle boots. She turns, and becomes a silhouette.

  • Grandparents with a super buggy. The woman strides ahead. The man pushes behind, all stiff and serious, the baby neither shaken nor stirred.

  • In the depths of an eatery, far across the intersection, a man appears to be propped up in a high chair, knees together and feet apart. The legs aren’t his, though, not at all - they’re part of the table.

  • Traffic stops at the lights. At the front is a woman on a motor scooter: black full-face helmet, purple jacket, turquoise jeans, suede boots tip-toeing the road.

  • A tall young woman walks with her tall, grey-goateed father. They both wear puffer vests. She slips her hands into her pockets, out of the wind.

  • Reaching for the Light

    On a highly reflective cafe counter crowded with lids, business cards, wooden bowls, condiments, hand sanitiser and stainless steel containers, four close-packed piles of white throwaway coffee cup lids curve gracefully sideways, like plants reaching for the light. They are mirrored in the counter top.

    Bakehouse Cafe, Drummoyne, Sydney

  • In Russia, one word could invite them
    To smash all your things and ignite them;
    So on Limerick Day
    It’s important to say
    That at least we’re entitled to write them.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine #LimerickDay

  • What Crimea made obvious then,
    Russian soldiers are proving again:
    They’re an alien strain,
    Base, malignant and vain …
    All along, they were little green men.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • Putin’s losing his tenuous grip on
    The country he wears as a clip-on;
    The man who relied
    On deceit has supplied
    All his own propaganda to slip on.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • No Bakhmut on Victory Day,
    And Wagner is fading away;
    The public won’t dare
    Set a foot in Red Square,
    And the piper has come for his pay.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • The Young Ones Look Down On Their Elders

    Old and new buildings are juxtaposed against each other, and against a blue sky in the sunshine. On the left is the Queen Victoria Building with its sandstone walls and sculptures and its green copper domes, overlaid on the blue exterior of a tall new building with a pink spire, pink trim, and blue-edged blocks of dark windows. To the right of this, almost as tall and almost touching it, is a grey and aqua green facade surmounted by a narrow block of windows and flat green wall, echoing the pink spire; and down low, against this building, stands the sandstone clock tower of the Sydney Town Hall, dwarfed by its modern neighbours.

    York Street, Sydney

  • From the Bridge you can see the grass behind the Opera House, and a white shape like a broken shell.

  • A young woman walks with stiff formality in a yellow skirt and red-blue jumper. She has long hair braided at the sides. Her forearm presses down on top of her handbag, the thumb and forefinger poised as if to capture something from the air.

    She turns suddenly, and speaks to her escort.

  • A middle-aged woman walks past in the city. She wears glasses with heavy frames, and a knitted green beanie that covers most of her dark hair. One arm is folded across her chest, and her free hand presses a phone against her ear.

    ‘I just lost a job, as well,’ she says.

  • An angry stick man rages on a building at the bottom of Druitt Street. He has a torso, two arms bent at the elbows, and a neck. No head, though, which is enough to upset anyone.

  • Two adults and a tiny girl walk past Scots Church at Wynyard. The girl is the only one with a suitcase; it’s purple and blue and as big as she is, trundling along behind her. She leads the way.

  • A woman in her 30s totters from the bottle shop, bent forward with her arms hanging down, fingertips clinging to a box that seems to pull her across the footpath. Her feet can barely keep up.

  • Generational Change

    Two tables inside a cafe, a gap between them and a different couple facing each other across each table. On the left, an old couple with white hair and cardigans, the man with a hand to his chin and gazing out the window. A purse on the table. On the right, a couple in their forties, in t-shirts and workout pants, working on laptops with the tops of their screens touching in the middle. A water bottle and sunglasses on the table.

  • In a twist that was hard to ignore,
    Putin briefly, while taking the floor,
    Gave his black operation
    A standing ovation,
    And finally called it a war.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine