shades of grey today

Just a glance at something left from yesterday . . .  she’s not amused . . .  and onto the pier

. . . always looks beautiful in its decrepit state and many locals will miss it once dismantled and replaced with this:

Down at the stade, the low cloud hangs around the old and the new . . .

. . . some reflections from the sculpture on Winkle Island . . .

. .  conceived and constructed by Leigh Dyer. The main material – stainless steel – gleams out today below the snapshot view of  West Hill.

Hurrying down George Street passed Bells Bicycles, I look up and then down . .

. . .  and then, once inside,  think how these might be cooked.

Decide too bring some colour to the end of a grey day  – cooked with coriander, cumin and turmeric – onward and upward.

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,
shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment
when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees
all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed
as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

It is raining there. The boulevard
and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack,
are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.

Now the storm goes away again in a series
of small, badly lit battle-scenes,
each in “Another part of the field.”

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat
tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;
think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.  Elizabeth Bishop  Little Exercise