Hi everyone,
I have been busy over the past month getting my new book edited and ready before Christmas. It is at the printers now and is called Words and Words and Kawau Island.
As you know New Zealand is the host for The Frankfurt Book Fair this year and it is in full swing at the moment. I was reminded as a member of The New Zealand Society of Authors, which is the New Zealand branch of PEN, that I needed to update by blog site with some recent poems. So this is the reason why I am posting so many poems in one blog. Some you will have met before,.
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An Elusive Sound
(in reply to Keith’s photograph)
I turned the page to see
your photograph, where three
white gulls possess the beach.
My response is immediate:
I feel the warmth, the light
wind on my face, the salt
on my lips - cold water slips
and slides around the grit
of sand beneath my toes
and memories of beach days
jostle and elbow each other
as they come crowding in.
The sea breeze tugs
and rustles my shirt
and gulls squabble, as gulls do,
above the pitter-patter sound
of their dabbling feet;
but after years of hearing
I can never quite remember
the sound of slow waves
as they talk to the beach.
Repeatedly I’m re-called
to come back to the source
- stand around for a while
with my feet in the sea
and replenish my inner
Aladdin lamp crowded
with soul-sounds - that round
sea-green lamp worn smooth
from constant use.
................................................
Losing the Age of Pisces
As poets we wake and know we’ve heard the sea
in its loneliness reach out and into our dreams,
but its language cries out in the ozone words
of some unknown tongue – we try to find our way
back down through the fathoms of speech to hear
what the sea repeatedly says and wants us to hear:
the sea: wiffling tide-tales into mangroves and sedges
the sea: pulsing old wisdoms up inlets and canals
the sea: slapping wordy rhythms onto speeding hulls
the sea: beating out phrases onto rocks and sand
but even poets can’t reach into the language of sea;
yet we know on obscure coasts, sea-words are held
in the Methuselah tongues which are dying. Dying
and maybe already erased, by the world take-over
with an English language full of policy and commerce
which has no words to give the sea speech
– it cannot conceive of the surrounding sea
being a
crouching god that speaks - nor care,
how it strikes the sea dumb with its
ignorance.
Our oceans shrunk to two words, ‘The Sea.’
People crowd to the cities. They fear the unknown.
No sea-words known by the man to name
the feeling of loss and sadness which linger
past ‘the little death,’ when the release
of his inner sea is gifted over to her.
No sea-words known by the woman to name
the depth of grief, which lingers on
when the amniotic sea she carried within
is lost as her sea-child is born.
The sea left speechless, circling our land in vain.
The sea left speechless, entwined along our DNA.
And the sea-tears fall alive from the people - the
proof
the sea lives, always there, as it lifts and lowers
tides,
both within them, and without them.
Wordless, the poets stumble on in their agony,
urgent to hear, to learn, to return the sea-words
back to the people.
..............................................................................
The Thousand Paths to Happiness
Autumn has
started its walk
on the hills and the cicadas
closing crescendo to summer
echoes over the metal-smooth water
and out to the end of the wharf
- as does the laughter from a group
of women laid along the sea-wall
deepening their tan
while moored in the bay
among the hotch-potch of local boats
a visiting fifty-foot schooner
oozes mood music over its lounging
crew in their dress-whites
sipping at highballs
which all brings to mind,
the thousand paths to happiness
as I look upon the polished water reflecting
back a bay of boat-toys, the weekend baches,
the summer people;
and I’m there too - still being the sunburnt kid,
standing alone on a harbour wharf, barefoot,
faded shorts, hands smelly from baiting
my home-rigged handline
–
with my rejection of
nine hundred and ninety-nine paths to live this life,
a hands-on life, to fry fish I've caught myself.
I need to
think more on this.
...................................................................................
Spring and September Winds
A
sudden scurry of leaves
across
the deck, and a clatter
of
something falling startles
the
afternoon heavy with the sound
of
gathering bees and the yellow
of
freesias.
The
glass surface of the harbour
has
crinkled like cellophane and the trees
in
the East are restless – by early evening
they’re
heaving birds into the sky – and yet
the
artist will not stand and hurry
outside
to unpeg the sheets which snap
at
the line, but continues to distill
the
yellow afternoon
much
like the cat continues to sleep
by
the sheltering tank stand, and goes
deeper
into its dream in the final
fragments
of sunlight.
....................................................................
On Chinese Snakes
Snakes have to learn
to be comfortable
with the inevitable
periodic slowdown
and hiding away
while being forced
to abandon
their patterned skin.
There will be grief
on watching a unique
persona so lovingly
built into intricate habits
fade into a paler
and paler shade of grey
toward a final day
when they’re calling up
the fire they’ve gathered off
the burning desert stones
until the sun explodes
within and their skin
splits from head to tail
and a new persona
at first soft and delicate
will strengthen into
fixed and larger patterns
and is freed to leave.
...........................................................................
The Retired Photographer
In any tight space enclosed
by walls he becomes over-large,
visible, a known voice, with a name,
an identity – and an expectation
he’ll do something other than sit.
So he walks down to the park, where
by sitting on a park-bench to soak
in the warmth of the late Spring sun
he becomes another ‘old dear’
with a limp and a stick - fades
into invisible in all the air.
Around him a multi-culture
of children, shout, laugh, climb
to swing upside down – a mother
calling out, ‘your hat, your hat,
come and get your hat’ – another
calls, ‘I said. Give your sister a turn!’
‘
A kindergarten of skaters swirl in, fling
their jackets down and elbow each other
to drink from the busy water-fountain,
just as suddenly they are gone again.
Two Indian dads leave off from
pushing their sons on the swings
to sit down beside him. They’re huddled
over into their worries. So tired. How early
they wake to enter the city traffic, how late
they get home. Are their jobs secure?
One says he applied to enter the Police Force,
‘just in case,’ but failed on the fitness test.
They both agree, with nodding heads,
that going back to India
is not an option.
Soon the local lads will arrive
to erupt out of a mixture of cars.
They’ll swarm all over the grass
in a game of touch-rugby and girls
will congregate to watch and giggle.
But for him, his afternoon has gone
into a page of notes, the start of a poem
and listening in on other lives.
The light is now perfect – time
to leave and photograph the local
roadside of flowering cherries.
There have been tones, accents,
languages both known and strange
and just now he’s been given the biggest
gap-toothed smile from a metre
of pink lycra hopping on one leg.
“My name’s Alisha, what’s yours mister?”
He’s visible and ready to be named again.
...................................................................................
Thinking on Cuckoos and Violets
From
the first migratory
call
of the Cuckoo to when
the
skies were quiet again
her
sadness flowed
slow and full
like
a broad river, winding
through
some Indian plain
haunted
by Sitar melodies
until
time tied her grief
to
the past and left it there
her
lover now only brief
memories
of shared laughter
on
the Cuckoo’s return
-
much like the initial
musk
of violets re-calls
a
glimpse of herself;
her
small hand held
as
the Arcade florist
pins
to her Mother’s lapel
the
luxury of damp violets.
