Every so often I do a bit of housekeeping on my blog and tidy up the way I have misused a word or left a word out or rearranged a word or… well, you get the idea, it was a cold day and I had nothing better to do. Anyhow, I found this interesting bit of info in my stats folder:

All Posts (626) 
Published (617) 
Drafts (2)
Private (7)

What’s that discrepancy after ‘All Posts’ and ‘Published’?
I thought I had published all my blog posts!
However, there is a nine-post limbo.

Drafts (2) is understandable, but Private (7)!
I don’t even remember them or what they could possibly contain. Am I bold enough to check? Do I really want to know? Should I just delete them and forget about it?

Ironically I did a blog post about Richard Flanagan’s book ‘Question 7‘ https://thoughtsbecomewords.com/2025/05/10/do-you-know-this-author/

Well, seeing as I am one of life’s hoarders, I am just going to ignore those mysteriously private posts and let them languish there for all eternity. Well, until I get too curious. Maybe I can use one of them next week…

Meanwhile, here is a not-so-private observation about my session at MoB (Museum of Brisbane) Ekphrastic Art Writing session at City Hall. I arrived late due to a public rally, hundreds of protesters calling for justice over the death of Aboriginal man Kuminjayi White while in custody. Fair enough. I slid open the door at MoB and joined a small group of people with pen and paper. Before undertaking the art of Ekphrasis we had visual prompts and some brief writing exercises before heading out into the beguiling gallery to find beautiful treasures old and new to write about in a lucid fashion, arty or otherwise.

Perversely, I detoured the beautiful/historic artworks, paintings and ceramics to admire the hand-printed posters for local music gigs in Brisbane in the 1970s. Destined for shop windows, brick walls and lamp posts, these raw, colourful and imaginative posters were only glanced at or pulled down, but now are surviving icons of a once vibrant and thriving local music scene. The posters fill a wall in the Museum but my eyes were lured by the Medicine Cabinet of brown, dusty bottles, peeling labels and gruesome details of the contents. Here is what I wrote in a quick attempt to understand a different side to Ekphrastic writing:

‘The Medicine Cabinet’
Pills, potions, powders and poisons. Frowning at me from the past, the names on the small yet ominous corked brown glass bottles and rusty tins with their peeling, discoloured paper labels were enough to make me shudder. Poulticine, good for pneumonia, pleurisy, tonsillitis, abscess, etc, with side effects. ‘Stomach Powder’, ‘Opium’, Bill Beans Laxatives, Alkia, Saltrates, all aimed at curing sufferers ills and chills. Surely Nitrate of Amyl Capsules would do more harm than good? Then there’s the ominous thin brown-ribbed bottle labelled ‘Thyroid/Ovarian’ treatment. I hope patients recovered regardless of the treatment but more often than not the old saying was invoked ‘Kill or cure’ with fingers crossed. There is perhaps beauty in knowing that modern medicines are more likely to save lives.

Wishing you a healthy life and insightful Ekphrasis!

💗 © 2025 Gretchen Bernet-Ward