🌞   🌛
John Arthur Nichol

  • Lukashenko, a toad Medieval,
    Lends his back to a poisonous weevil,
    And of course he gets bitten:
    The fable was written
    In Russia, whose stories are evil.

    🇺🇦

  • For Russia’s Un-Victory Day,
    There’ll be no Immortal display;
    The inglorious dead
    Who’ve been ruthlessly fed
    To the grinder have too much to say.

    🇺🇦

  • A Secret Door

    Between two big display windows and a sandstone column is a pair of narrow black doors. One door is open, with a white bucket in the doorway. The space beyond is dark and shadowy, but it’s just possible to make out a man’s face looking back at the camera.

    Queen Victoria Building, Sydney

  • One of Sydney’s tireless working pigeons is cleaning the cafe floor. The little brown dog is desperate to make its acquaintance.

  • A blonde girl leans suspiciously over the side of her high chair, wondering what her father is doing with the safety belt. She sits up again, satisfied that he can’t make it work. Then the buckle clicks in place and she howls, red-faced, in protest.

  • A man stands on the footpath with a little brown dog under his arm. He photographs the menu and sends it.

  • At the next table in the cafe is a later-middle-aged English woman with long white hair and a squeaky, young person’s voice, enthusiastically naming airlines and discussing travel and itineraries. She listens, too, but ends her companion’s sentences with ‘Ya’:

    ‘Ya … Ya … Ya … Ya … I know.’

  • A wedding-banded man in his thirties speaks to his friend who’s joined him for a cafe breakfast:

    ‘So this is my time now. This is my time to have French toast.’

  • Leafy Carpark

    Part of the front of a three-storey carpark seen from the footpath. The carpark’s facade is composed of squares and rectangles, two levels per storey. Some are open to reveal the interior. Some are enclosed by vertical rails, some by solid panels, and many others by thriving plants grown in the holes of concret panels or in tiered garden boxes. On the path is front of the carpark is more greenery and a bicycle parking space.

    Manly Vale, Sydney

  • A squib of a firework pops
    Near a dome of the Kremlin and drops;
    Thus will Russia explain
    Killing kids in Ukraine,
    In their beds and their gardens and shops.

    🇺🇦

  • The Russians explained it so well,
    How their bombs that hit Belgorod fell -
    ‘The abnormal descent
    Of munitions unspent’ -
    Has it happened in Moscow as well?

    🇺🇦

  • A tiny, unprovenanced flare
    Over Moscow; hysterics to spare.
    But the odious gremlin
    Was not in the Kremlin,
    They say: he was hiding elsewhere.

    🇺🇦

  • Alien Treescape

    We can see one wall of a brick house on a corner block, part of its tiled roof and parts of the red brick garden walls at the front and side. Everything else is concealed by the strange shapes of big and small poplar trees, or cypresses. The two tallest of these have grown together, like twin cones, distinguished only by their separate summits as they stand in mottled greens against a bright blue sky. The light gives the trees a peculiar quality, so that they resemble a collection of sea-sponges, or clumps of coloured steel wool.

  • A cafe in the depths of Warringah Mall. Two hilarious little girls share a table with their mother, while a grandmother slumps on the sidelines, exhausted or excluded, hands hanging between her knees.

  • The bus door opens and a woman tilts her stroller to wheel it aboard. Immediately, a child’s voice wails, ‘No no no bus! No bus!’ The ‘No’ has an ‘o’ as in ‘off’ and ‘bus’ has a ‘u’ as in ‘pussycat’.

    She steers into the aisle and it’s a boy in the stroller, distraught now, red-faced and teary, thrashing around and crying ‘No bus! No bus!’ over and over. His panic-stricken eyes dart everywhere as the mother parks him facing backwards and crouches down in front of him.

    ‘Buses are fun!’ she squeaks in an accent, but he’s having none of it and reaches out to scratch her in the face. She pulls her head back.

    They remain like this, him wailing and kicking, her crouching and cajoling, for almost their entire journey. Almost. There’s a moment when the boy giggles suddenly and smiles at his mother, eyes twinkling. But it really is just a moment. The protest resumes, and continues all the way to the corner of Lyons Road in Drummoyne, where the howls finally subside as she wheels him off the bus.

  • Single-decker buses don’t speak. That’s just how the world has evolved. So when the 504 suddenly announces: ‘Next stop, Quirk Street,' it’s a terrible shock. There’s a hole in the universe, and some other reality has broken through.

  • Succulents reach for the sun like tall green flowers, at the entrance to a block of flats in Mosman.

  • Greenery like tinsel wraps around two silos near the Anzac Bridge.

  • A Gap in the Trees

    Looking through a gap in the foliage to a small park stippled with light and shadow, with a bench in the foreground and sandstone buildings on either side. Nearby on the left is part of a glass tower block, and to its right is a patch or blue sky with the top of a white, octagonal tower with long, low windows on each face, like slats.

    Wynyard Park, Sydney

  • Ruscist Putin adores to deceive
    Lowly Russians, who live by his leave:
    Kyivan Rus’ - no discussian
    Could label it Russian;
    The truth’s in the name, and it’s Kyiv.

    🇺🇦

  • A zindan’s a hole with a grate,
    Where the Russians keep soldiers of late,
    Their genius and flair
    Changing fear and despair
    To morale, but it doesn’t translate.

    🇺🇦

  • Another young woman is dead.
    Her three-year old daughter is dead.
    They’re dead to delight
    All the hatred and spite
    In a sad little narcissist’s head.

    🇺🇦

  • Another Day at the Office

    A man sits on a city footpath with his legs stretched out in front of him, resting his back against the base of a window between two sandstone columns and looking down with concentration at a laptop computer on his knee. He wears business clothes - a white shirt, black trousers and shiny black shoes. He has a full head of brown hair tied in a ponytail, a grey goatee beard, black-framed spectacles and white cables trailing down from his ears. Pedestrians in the foreground walk towards the camera, and one of them glances down at the seated man.

  • When there aren’t any cars on Pittwater Road, the silence is like the end of the world.

  • A single hiking boot lies abandoned on a bus stop roof.

    Top deck of a B1. It’s a whole new world.