Deb Curreen Author

  My friends and I sang hymns the other night, our voices trembled and my heart sighed - not one song mentioned the miracle that we need but they all mentioned love, love, love. I'm not sure Love will save us at this point, I hope I'm wrong. The budget is dropping on our country soon,  sprinkling carrot dust everywhere, pausing dreams and driving hope over a crumbling cliff, like the Pohutukawa trees down at my beach. People and trees, sliding into the foam of dirty waves on the shore, where seagulls cry with the nation. The water never used to be so dirty. I'm sure those pollytishons just throw ideas into GPchat and call them pollycees,  firing them out into the world, bullets of doom, while grasping a fresh payslip, increased by the country's worries. Greedy bastards, asbestos hearts, can Grace save such wretches as these. I might write my own hymns, add more miracles, take out the love, and call down fire. Where to strike first? I'll leave that up to God, I'm...

 I've kept the notebook that you gave me (the one with the lavender, blue & green cover) on my bedside table positioned perfectly, with pen, for to-do lists, notes and poems, like this one. But like all the other notebooks, planners, diaries and lined pads I've owned, one day it just wandered off, to who knows where, a picnic? To do some shopping, a dance rave or just a kip under the hedge. I was bereft and confused, I thought that little book was safe. I'd only turned my back for a second,  and...it...was....  Gone. Then after many months,  last night I found it, tucked beneath some vitamin bottles  in my top drawer, hiding guilty and looking just a little dusty. From now on,  I'm going to tear pages from those squirrely books, keepsakes of  my words, to-do lists, memories and more Just in case, one day you, my one and only notebook, go running off and just like all the others, you never come back.