Ennui is a comfortable covering for tired feet

Crossed feet wearing blue slippers beside a colorful rug
AI generated image

An old mate of mine from our formation days has been in touch, encouraging me to expand my creative writing endeavours.

He sent me a book, “How To Grow Your Own Poems,” by Kate Clanchy.

One exercise is to mix up a series of abstract and concrete nouns with one’s own homegrown definitions. The results are startling and evocative. Who knew that the stuckness of ennui could be so productive? I’ve taken this unusual pairing and built some verse on it.

Ennui is a comfortable covering for tired feet.
It muffles all those thoughts so fleet,
The day drifts by on silent wings,
While dust settles softly on forgotten things.
Yet somewhere beneath that woven grey,
A spark still waits for a brighter day,
And bored old feet, when rested enough,
May wander again toward wonder and stuff.

(c) Dennis Ryle, October, 2026

A Blessing for Those Who See in Clear Lines

For the many in our midst who live with neurodiversity

May the clarity within you be honoured – the way truth arrives sharp, clean, and unmistakable.

May you be blessed with companions who understand that your way of seeing is not a lack, but a different kind of fidelity – a commitment to what is real, solid, and trustworthy.

When the world becomes tangled with shades and maybes, may you find calm paths through the noise, and people who help translate the grey without asking you to abandon the black and white.

May your straightforward heart be met with kindness. May your honesty be received as gift. May your presence remind others that simplicity can be sacred, and clarity can be a form of courage.

And may you, in your own way, discover moments of gentle widening – not to blur your vision, but to let compassion sit alongside certainty, so that both may guide you with grace.

Life on Mars

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While missiles fly amidst boastful taunts and puffed-out chests, survival of Mars depends on a memory that awakens a yearning for our better selves. The great war god, starved by the irritations of inconvenient truths, gorges himself on retribution. He calls it justice. Far away, the red planet named after him offers perspective, gazing sunward on that blue-green orb that once dreamed of peace and restoration. Perhaps it still does!

Hail the month of March
Cradling hope of equinox
A balance renewed.

(c) Dennis Ryle, March 2026

This is a haibun, a short bit of prose that is concluded with a haiku. dVerse host, Frank Tassone hosts this week’s Haibun Monday, “where we blend haiku with prose in the form Basho made famous.”
We are invited to write our own tribute to the theme of Tracy K. Smith’s “Life on Mars” exploring grief, cosmic wonder, and the search for meaning in a universe marked by loss and mystery, framed especially through elegy for her father and reflections on humanity’s place in the vast unknown.
 

Values on the Verge

AI creation

In recent days, a politician named immigration as a key issue for debate, citing “Australian values” as a key determinant of who to let in and who to keep out. I have never yet heard a politician explain what “Australian values” are.

They bang on ’bout values in this town — like they’re etched in river stone,
But anyone who’s walked these streets knows nothing stays that still.
It’s hauled out when the polls look rough, a slogan on a phone,
A way to sort the “locals” from the ones outside the bill.

They claim it’s what the nation is — the heartbeat of the place,
Yet watch it shift from booth to booth along the party line.
A shorthand for the flag and footy, wrapped in earnest face,
A story told with certainty that struggles to align.

For some, it’s cafés, rooftop bars, the tram’s late‑night refrain;
Others say it’s locks and border talk, a tale kept tight and narrow.
It’s fought across the talkback waves, the feed, the party train;
A restless thing, half civic pride, half politician’s arrow.

So here we stand on concrete ground, where truth runs where it will:
A nation wide as dreaming tracks, too big for tidy tales.
And “values,” mate? They’re just a word the powerful wield still,
A fence they shift from year to year across the urban trails.

(c) Dennis Ryle February 2026

In the Alcove of the Unasked

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Sanaa invites the dVerse poet community to delve into their dreams as a rich source for literary expression. I have been attempting this the last little while and offer this nugget in the raw for self-edification more than anything!

I walked the long coast,
salt in my lungs,
hunger in my bones,
seeking a table not yet set.
The café was hollow,
a shell of welcome,
bare but for one alcove
where laughter gathered like tide.
I asked to sit
not knowing if I belonged
and they made room,
as if grace were a game
played by strangers
who knew the rules of kindness.
They spoke in riddles,
a missing word,
a misting truth,
and I, still faint from the walk,
asked if the question itself
was broken.
Is it “missing”
like a name forgotten,
or “misting”
like memory blurred by time?
And they nodded,
not with answers,
but with presence.
So I sat,
Stockman’s pie in hand,
and let the mystery feed me.

(c) Dennis Ryle, November, 2025

Tripping

Triplet Falls, Victoria, Creative Commons

If one might take a trip,
One could consider Triplet Falls
or Tripod Waterhole
Can we get there by Trip Point Road
Or via Trip Creek Station?
Only a 2700-kilometre road trip
can link them.
(Those we can find)
Fill her up!
Who’s coming?

(c) Dennis Ryle, January, 2026

This is my response to Punam’s dVerse prompt to write a 44-word quadrille using the word “trip.” As a veteran of many long road trips through this wide, mostly brown land, I looked on the map for place names containing the letter sequence “trip.” We’ve not been to any of them, so… one day?

Lines Across a Divided Country

I’m learning things about poetry I’ve never previously been aware of. It seems that one can enter a conversation with a well-known poet by writing a glosa – taking four lines of any of their works and incorporating them in a particular expansion in one of your own. Björn Rudberg is today’s dVerse host, guiding us to have a go at this genre

So on the eve of one of Australia’s most contentious days, I’ve selected Banjo Paterson’s We’re All Australians Now. He wrote it in 1916, addressed to front-line WWI soldiers, reflecting on a newly evolved sense of national unity in the wake of the Gallipoli campaign, a failed military project, but a significant contributor to an independent and resilient national identity. Read it in full here. Over a century later, our feeling of unity is rather shattered, so here is an opportunity to dialogue with one of this country’s most celebrated bards over the matter.

Australia takes her pen in hand
To write a line to you,
To let you fellows understand
How proud we are of you.
– from “We’re All Australians Now,” Banjo Paterson, 1916

Canberra’s had a week of it
Of pollies’ hot air squawk
You’d think that they’d pull back a bit
And think before they talk
So now the coalition’s split
And we wonder how things stand
Reprising a time when it was fit –
Australia takes her pen in hand.

It seems that when we speak of unity
There’s much more that divides
Whate’er we hold up for scrutiny
Has us rushing to take sides
To find a middle voice
Between all points of view
Leads us to this choice
To write a line to you.

Climate change ignites a spark
as fire, wind, and floods increase
Yet every warning turns to bark
in quarrels that never cease
First Nations hold the know-how
To tend this wide brown land
Their ancient voice speaks even now
To let you fellows understand.

Instead, we play one-upmanship
on things meant to bind, not part
while trying not to lose our grip
and heal a broken heart.
Yes, once there was a common cause
that held us fast like glue
Enough to write without a pause
How proud we are of you.

Finis

Bluff Knoll’s White Christmas

Bluff Knoll, Creative Commons

It happened on Christmas Day in ‘ninety-eight
A once-in-a-lifetime event!
Western Australia’s only “White Christmas”
at the height of summer.
Not just a light dusting
Twenty centimetres blanketing the summit
Two years before a new millennium
Harbinger of stranger things!

(c) Dennis Ryle, January 2026

This is in response to the dVerse Poetics invitation sent out by Kim. It is inspired by snow as an accompaniment to new beginnings, inspired by the turn of the year. Well, not much of that in a hot Aussie summer – but there was that one occasion. And Christmas is close enough to the New Year to count.