Helen Lehndorf
writer
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collage with fabric
A couple of fabric collages I made. (Photos are a little blurry – I think my ancient camera is starting to fail me.) I’m not sure if that is the right term – I’ve seen similar things called ‘mini-quilts’ but that seems a little absurd to me…unless they are quilts for dolls or mice.
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In the garden…
The tomatoes are ripening by the bowlful every day and we are eating lovely pasta sauces and soups which taste of the sun and make me realise how insipid tinned tomatoes are! The chillies are starting to fruit – just in time for the cold of autumn, which will stunt their growth in no time.…
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This is not a gratuitous cute kitten photograph…
…it’s a cute chicken photo, instead. This is Cockatrice – one of our hens. She is the leader of the pack, top of the pecking order and frankly, the brains of the bunch. She was also a quick developer – the first to grow her full comb and to start laying eggs. Cockatrice is intelligent,…
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leaf water stone sky
I visited the creek. The stones hosted the leaves. The leaves bathed in the water. The water held the sky.
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The David Merritt Experience
I met David Merritt late last year when a colleague introduced us. We had a coffee and talked poetry and chickens and politics and I was very impressed by his dry, self-effacing humour and sharp-as-a-tack brain. When you talk to David it isn’t like the tennis of usual conversation: my turn, your turn, my turn,…
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‘May I admire you again today?’
There was a brief window in the 1980s when people told me I looked like Molly Ringwald. I have brown eyes, full lips, thick hair. I loved Molly. I loved the way she chewed her lip, how she gave off an aura of ‘I’m quite resilient, but also tender, baby, tender like the tiniest pea.…
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open heart
(Life is) “…a slow, elated, awed recovery from humiliation.” -Geoff Cochrane On New Year’s Eve we climbed the hill behind the house and drank wine until the sun had gone. I gnawed on grass stems because they tasted like peas. When clouds crossed the moon, I couldn’t see your face and you talked about the…
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the next step
‘Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.’ -Chuck Close Halfway through last year I started work on my second book. The first book was out of my hands while it was being edited, laid out and designed. I had some notion of what I wanted the second…
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corn bones
I am always walking up or down the driveway – and the corn is getting bigger or it is just starting or it is gone. There is always something I am worrying about but the focus of the worry changes but the worry doesn’t change – it is tinnitus. Brain plaque. I am always wondering…
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manifest poetry
Yesterday I found a bird skull in the garden while I was weeding. I like the way there is a little patch of feathers on the top of it’s head, like a macabre toupee. In one of those cases of art foreshadowing life, I wrote a poem a long while back about digging up bird…
Helen Lehndorf 