Some weeks, poetry just leaves me. There's no words, no real intensity of emotion and beauty that makes life a poem, just the constancy of life: prosaic, lacklustre. It's not depression, or sadness, just a state of being uninspired and exhausted. Plodding through lockdown feels like a chore, like I'm red ticking boxes of the endless days that lead to nowhere but more lockdowns, more surveillance, more paranoia, more intrusion on living. Gratitude platitudes grate. They feel forced. No one can talk about their real feelings without someone delegitimising them by saying 'well, you could be fleeing the Taliban' or 'at least you're not trying to work with young kids at home' and so on. Yesterday was RUOK day. No one from work rang to see if I was okay, though there were signs I wasn't, in the form of actually saying I wasn't. But then no one seems to be okay.

It's not that I'm not feeling. I'm probably feeling too much. Empathy makes things heavy and painful. I think about the woman in Afghanistan. I think of the mother in town whose 14 year old son ended his life last week and how terrible it must be to grieve in lockdown, and then chastise myself because I know it's hard to grieve at any time.

I find myself rebelliously angry. Our prime minister flew a private jet to Canberra for 'state' reasons including seeing his father for Father's Day, and meanwhile, I cannot legally see my father for his birthday, let alone a national day of celebrating family. This is the same man who went on holiday to Hawaii whilst Australia burned, and enjoyed researching his family history in Cornwall on a trip to the UK whilst most of the UK was in lockdown. I felt like that red faced emoji with an expletive duck taped on his fury. He cannot truly express what he feels, just gets more and more scarlet with rage. It's pointless. I know my anger does not serve me, but still it bubbles, scalding like the bubbles of sugar in the blood orange marmalade I burnt last week.

There is not much to do with this anger in lockdown. You can't shape it into anything, or piff it into the sea, especially when you live 30 kms from it and you're forced into a pathetic 5 kilometre radius. Teaching is just looking at circle avatars - the kids don't turn their screens on, and I'm forced to stare at my tired face and remember how old I'm getting, and how life is slipping us by as we respond to this pandemic with borders and rules and vaccine passports and more divisions and fear than will do any of us any good. Even if you don't want to think about it it's there, in the conversations you catch in snippets as people walk by you in the street.

And so, I break rules, and feel justified, and gleeful. I rise an hour before dawn, make a coffee, drag on jeans, boots and woollies and head to the ocean for that liminal pre dawn wonder, where it is extraordinarily hard not to feel poetry. There are rumours the coppers are checking number plates, giving fines. I choose not to believe. I choose to believe they have other things to do than worry about a woman desperate for a mental health break, and that they likely believe someone going for a surf is hardly going to be a super spreader of a virus I don't believe in anymore - not because I believe that it doesn't exist, just that I am not scared of it. We die. It would be nice to live in the meantime, on our own terms.

Then just like that, regional Victoria is out of lockdown again, just in time for Mum's 72nd birthday. After a dawn surf I catch up with her and my sister and go for a walk on the beach, then meet with Dad for a cuppa and almond croissant. Home again and I nap in the sunshine waiting for the hubs to finish work.

I wake up to the brrrp of Messenger - it's my son and his girl vidoe calling. It's been three months since I've seen my son, and I won't until Melbourne is free, and despite how sleepy I am, I answer because I miss them so. His girl holds her hand up to the camera, showing off a ring with dark Australian sapphires. I don't know why I didn't expect it - high school best friends, they've been together for five years, and I guess that's what people do. But I am surprised, so much so that I cry. I'm pleased, of course - I love them both to bits. It's lovely news.

There's poetry in the world, alright.