🌞   🌛
John Arthur Nichol

  • 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

  • The Red Square agenda was shortent -
    No flyover! Very important!
    The odds are increasing
    Of pilots releasing
    Their bombs where they know that they oughtn’t.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • With no military left to parade;
    May the ninth is a little bit staid;
    The gaps are compelling,
    Resistance is swelling,
    And Putin, poor diddums, is frayed.

    🇺🇦 #Ukraine

  • In defeat, Putin thinks he will slide
    To some haven, with justice denied;
    But perhaps he will lunch
    On a novichok crunch,
    With a caesium sauce on the side.

    🇺🇦

  • Poor Putin. Ukraine has resources.
    They’re crushing his soldiers and horses.
    So he’s taking his ball
    And he’s charging them all
    With discrediting Russia’s armed forces.

    🇺🇦

  • Putin says, ‘We’re all reasonable men.
    Sign here. Use my poisonous pen.
    Then we’ll all go and play,
    But don’t get in my way,
    Or I’m saying the N word again.'

    🇺🇦

  • iPhone vs The Sun

    A photograph taken looking into the sun, which appears as a huge, whited-out circle in the top right-hand corner. Trees, cars and houses on the right are hazy, washed out by the sun’s glare, with sharp points of light reflecting from car bonnets, rooves and windscreens. On the left, across a road, is a building under construction, in shadow, with cars and a double-decker bus passing in front of it and a crane on top rising tall against a blue sky. In the foreground on the right, a turning car and a distant light pole cast long shadows on the road.

    Manly Vale, Sydney

  • Two teenage boys sit together on the bus. One has his head tipped back and a bucket hat over his eyes.

    A man approaches the vacant seat in front of them, but stops.

    “Tommy your bag!” says the second boy, and the first boy jerks awake. He stares. He leaps up and reaches forward, dragging a backpack from the seat in front and onto his lap. He wraps his arms around it and drops his head on top of it.

    The man sits down.

  • Miner vs Mynah

    I’m about to sit down at the bus stop when an aerial dogfight all but smashes into my face. The pursuer breaks off at the last moment and roars back into the sky. Its quarry banks sideways with a snap and makes an emergency landing on the back of the bench. It sits there, looking shaken.

    Locals 1, Invaders 0.

  • A girl with long black hair in a single plait, a red top and black long pants is doing circuits at the Dee Why Grand, gliding down the slippery dip and climbing up again.

    The mother stands at the ladder and hoists a toddler into the air, like an offering. It’s a dangling lump half the girl’s size and twice as bulky, but she takes it on board with a grin and struggles to the head of the slippery dip. Arranging the child with care, she sits down and they disappear.

    The mother waits at the bottom.

  • Two Skies

    Looking across a carpark with a grey, gabled building on the left and a Norfolk Pine tree on the right, towards a beach, a dark grey sea with a flat horizon, and a sky with two contrasting aspects. For a short distance above the horizon the sky is pale blue with fluffy white clouds. Above this hang dark stormclouds, reaching all the way to the top of the photo. The grey building on the left has a balcony with five black umbrellas standing folded against the dark grey clouds. Two boys in black are hurrying up the beach towards the carpark.

    Collaroy Beach, Sydney

  • So the tyrant is losing his sway,
    And his chef says he’s going away,
    Leaving Putin to chew
    On ignominy stew
    As he hides during Victory Day.

    🇺🇦