Weekly Photography Challenge: Collage

I thought I might make a new collage to photograph for this weeks challenge, but yet again, the week has run away from me (or with me?). Anyway, I made this little book some years ago, and it’s full of collaged elements. I cut words and definitions out of an old dictionary to illuminate the quotes I used in it.

Click on the images for detail.

Making collage out of a collection of miscellaneous scraps can be great fun, and I’m often amazed at how meaningful random juxtapositions can be. I think it’s about time I assembled a hodgepodge pile of bits and pieces and made another little book!

Friday Poem: Ache

I’m mining the back catalogue for this week’s poem. I have not been to that place where the hums are lately, but I need to go there soon….

Wounds heal

But, God, the scars ache.

Broken hearts and broken bones

Will both be mended

But, God, they ache

Whenever the days are bleak

And cold.

Time heals

But, God, it aches,

The memory of pain,

Raw where the scars are

Brutal at the mend.

The poem is one of those in “Rainbow and Rope”, which I made nearly 20 years ago. I worked out how to put it together by looking at old cloth-bound books, and made three copies, each slightly different. I had an electronic typewriter (since deceased), which I typed up all the pages on, with a lot of messing around to get them in the right order once cut up and sewn together. Some of the poems have coloured illustrations, all individually drawn. To do something like that now, I would probably do it all digitally – perhaps scanning hand drawn illustrations, but not doing them individually.

I have produced a book of my Christmas poems (which I’ve added to our Christmas cards for years), but I did it online, and used photos for illustrations. Is that lazy? I do remember that working out how to make a book and then doing it was pretty exciting at the time: but then, so is designing a photo book of poems.

The photo at the top I took in Ararat, under a blooming bottlebrush, which was alive with Little Lorrikeets enjoying the nectar. I’m not sure if was them or their much larger cousins, the White Cockies, who snipped off the flowers.