Some of my favourite lines from poetry are the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

“April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

I suppose as you age it is cruel to be reminded that everything in nature revives at spring time and the earth is filled with new life. But the years go on relentlessly and wreck damage to our aging bodies.

I just received a letter from my friend Liz, in Melbourne, telling me that the countryside is all green. This is the time of the year when much of Australia is usually burnt brown after the summer’s heat and draught. The trees are denser and the wild flowers are in their spectacular best. But the floods had caused a lot of damage and the clearing up is still going on while it has stirred the dull roots and nature is once again ‘breeding lilacs’.

As for me, after a hectic first few months of holidays and visitors I am settling down to writing.

My dull roots are  ’stirred by ‘memory and desire’