These Spring mornings: tanka, August 2013

this time last year

twice-daily hospital visits

not yet knowing

my husband had left

less than a month of life

11/8/13

These Spring mornings

light is music, playing soft.

I open curtains 

to let my garden inside. 

I feel I'm out there, singing.

27/8/13

Bright and cold: haiku, August 2013

late winter morning

bright and cold

clouds move past the trees

27/8/13  #lune

Spring morning.

All the leaves moving

gently.

August noon.

Coming down the steep hill

my friends.

31/8/13

I look up: American sentences Aug. 2013

I look up at the full moon through a cobweb shining from roof to tree. 20/8/13

A dangling leaf begins to turn on its stem: imperceptible breeze.  22/8/13

Not far out of town, the rainforest still edges roads and covers hills.  28/8/13

I pull over, close my eyes, meditate ... falling leaves hit my car, thump. 28/8/13

After the election, Australia boards a train to nowhere.  8/9/13


Submitted Nov. 2013 for dVerse Meeting the Bar: American Sentences

Secret Love Letters

The writing of 'secret letters',  posted publicly to unnamed recipients, was a game on MySpace in 2007. All your friends then had to guess who was who, and particularly try to spot themselves. Being me, of course I did it in poetry, and made them love letters. The dVerse prompt today is for letter poems. I've written lots! But these from 2007 have not been shared here before. Some of those to whom they were addressed I knew only on MySpace, others in 'real life' as well. 

Secret Love Letters

1.

To you, what can I say

that hasn't already been said?

All possible declarations have been made —

though sweet in the repetition.

This is the craziest love

or the sanest.

If there was lust, it would be

the ultimate in star-crossed.

Luckily for us,

we're otherwise inclined.

And so we love deliciously

mind to mind.

And yes, we love with passion –

of the soul, not the flesh.

Almost flirtatious, nearly romantic,

silly with happiness.

Only this you have not yet remarked:

you are the one

calling the tune.

And me? Darling, I'm dancing!

2.

We've never met in person,

likely never shall,

and yet we touch.

I know you in your images.

I wonder if you know

how much they could only be yours.

You have a particular way

of combining colours, a fondness

for certain patterns and forms….

I know you in your words,

and know your countryside

and your own garden.

Like me, you dwell

in a place of rivers and leaves.

You show me its detail, its shape.

Your paintings evoke a child

falling in love with the earth,

which opens to her delight.

And your poems tell it all —

including the mother, the lover,

the she who's both tender and wise.

I enter your page on bare feet.

We walk your landscape together,

hug each other and smile.

3.

You're growing up so fast,

my Child of Light —

whom I never address that way,

even inside our circle.

I may have mentioned my thought

that the Universe gave us each other

for its own inscrutable reasons.

If I did, you may have heard.

We talk about computers,

music, photography, clothes and food,

what sort of work you fancy

and which boys.

I watch who stalks your profile.

'Get your sleazy paws off,'

I snarl through cyberspace

silently, raising protection.

With home, too, a place of danger

from which you can't yet escape,

you have learnt to be subtle and strong.

It is enough for the moment.

Later, Child of Light,

I will tell you the mysteries

of an ancient star-born race

and a task to fulfil.

4.

Then, I didn't know

you called yourself Moon Goddess.

Round as the moon,

you strode on stage;

your voice 'as big as Texas'

hit the furthest wall

of the long, corridor-style café.

Yelling defiance

or husky with grief,

your words pulled no punches.

I fell in love instantly.

On the footpath after the workshop,

where you'd settled for a fag

with a bunch of your mates

(I guess you'd say buddies?)

you looked up and excused yourself

from labouring to your feet for a hug.

'I'm a big girl,' you said, shrugging.

I bent right down and hugged you anyway.

Later I saw that we must have dislodged

one of my blood-red earrings

onto that dark pavement.

You refused a party invitation

and made yourself late for work

to come to the reading

on my last night in town.

It was quiet with a hint of rain,

the balmy Austin spring

beginning to fray at the edges.

I gave you my book. Your face lit.

When we kissed goodbye, your cheek

was the softest flesh ever felt.

This was a year ago, when you were still 22.

5.

You are the one

who broke my heart,

departing suddenly

without a word

after we'd got so close.

I can still see your face,

its grave beauty

deceptively serene.

Your loving words were like

the touch of a gentle hand.

It wasn't just me.

We were all astounded,

the circle of friends who loved

your kind heart, and the wisdom

hard won, softly shared.

I rejoiced to find a sister

with a firm Christian faith

albeit I am a witch. How deep

we went for common ground,

trusting in Love, Peace and Truth.

Abruptly you were gone.

I know you knew

how much it would hurt.

When another friend went missing,

you were my comforter.

We made enquiries.

You were not ill,

nothing was wrong.

You simply chose to withdraw,

the messenger said.

You might even come back….

Just as well we didn't hold

our collective breath!

The trouble is,

I loved you.

Addition / Subtraction: the Mathematics of Loss

You

are woven

fast into my fabric.

How shall I unravel you? Yet I must.

Your thread has stopped — no sudden cutting short; it is completed.

A new, plainer pattern starts. In time there’ll be a length of stuff without a sign of you.

In time there will be something I don’t know yet and cannot now begin to envision —

except that it will include an absence. But you can’t include

absence is that which is not included. Then

I’ll yearn to re-ravel

you into

life.

This is an experiment suggested by Tony Maude at dVerse Form For All: a syllabic poem based on the Triangular Numbers in a mathematical progression known as Pascal's Triangle (in turn: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15 and 21 syllables per line). In my version, obviously, the syllables also reverse back the other way, reflecting the movement of what is said, between addition and subtraction.

I am also submitting this piece to Poets United's Verse First ~ Edit to Elevate.

Soltary Gingko Walk, Evening

winter sunlight

an unknown bird

shrieking

late afternoon

purple flowers 

huddle together 

the sun dazzling

just before dusk

birds converse

August afternoon

clouds stipple the sky

behind the mountain

twilight

two girls in tight pants

walking fast

on the far road

small car tows caravan

a mapgie flies over

late winter sun

the sustained chirrups

of homing birds

Sunday evening

the big truck

heads home empty

dots of clover

in the nature strip

the sun lowers

shadows lengthen

the birds get busy

before bed

wattle and bottlebrush

paint the street yellow

dusk falls

the smell of cooking

voices through flywire

dark coming down

Old friends in Melbourne posted on facebook about poetry walks: Jennie Fraine is creating a series of Spring walks for people who like to walk and write at the same time; Myron Lysenko posted a reminder about an upcoming gingko walk (for the purpose of creating haiku). These are group events, and Melbourne is too far away these days, but I decided to take the hint and set off on a solitary walk of my own, armed with notebook, pen and camera.

Submitted for Poets United's Poetry Pantry #162

Some people saw this before I decided to add photos. After reading kind comments suggesting I had made word pictures, I wondered if adding actual snaps was a mistake. Upon reflection, and after seeking some readers' opinions, I have made the photos small and moved them to the end of the poem. I like it very much that the words create pictures in people's imaginations, so I didn't want to interfere too much with that.

Bush Ballad, Seventies Style

At dVerse today they're writing cowboy poems — a great tradition, I've just learned. In Australia we have bush poetry, a contemporary oral form, very popular. Before that, in our earlier days, there were bush ballads glorifying rural life and the countryside. 

In 1977 I was travelling the outback with my then husband Bill Nissen and our two young sons. We broke down, were low on provisions, there was nothing but empty land in view, and it was HOT. We did get help from another passing traveller, but meanwhile I was inspired to this jaundiced little ditty, in the heavy, sing-song rhythmic pattern of the old bush ballads — a riposte to their rosy view of rural Australia. It became an oral performance piece and was also published in Street Poetry (Melbourne).


Oh, you're trekking out of Darwin
in a big Ford truck,
or you've took and boiled your billy
on the old Cloncurry track.

The cattle die behind you
and the red dust sucks you up —
they'll shear you quick as look at you
in the Great Out Back.

Observing Line and Metre (Non-Diverse)

After a discourse on line and metre, Gay at dVerse Form For All — Prosody invites us to take a few lines of our own free verse and rewrite them in iambic feet of any line length — noting that unrhymed iambic pentameter is called blank verse. (I admit, she said we could include a few anapests.) Well, I tried. I thought it might fix some languishing draft that wasn't working yet, but it did not improve any of them! Instead, a new piece:

Iambic feet and pentametric lines

will make my verses blank; is that not so?

Well, blank means only that they are unrhymed

(and following that metre, as I’ve said)

but many poems gallop to this beat

and solemn topics rollick jollily

in inappropriate cheerfulness of pace.

There’s more to poetry than may be found

in repetitions of de-DA-de-DA,

in lines of even length, in perfect count

of syllables in alternating stress.

I like a sonnet, but a haiku too

is poetry I think — indeed, insist!

And as for this, my friends, it’s doggerel
(also a piece of fun to start my day).


PS When it comes to metre, this is my favourite reminder:

Remember this verse:

Iambic feet are firm and flat                                                             - / - /

and come down heavily like that

Trochees dancing very lightly                                                        / - / -

Sparkle, froth and bubble brightly.

Dactylic daintiness lilting so prettily                                               / - - / - -

Moves about fluttering rather than wittily

While for speed and for haste such a rhythm is best                    - - / - - /

As we find in the race of the quick Anapest.

(Source unknown)

Stillness, Late Winter

Leaves 
against blue sky

my eye drawn up

the lightest breeze

on the vines

orange flowers

honey-laden

sunlight touches grass

Submitted for Poets United's Verse First — The Red Wheelbarrow. Assignment: an eight-line poem of complex simplicity. (Hard to do as well as William Carlos Williams did!)

Tweet Poems

Explanatory note

These are poems I write specifically for posting on twitter (and then duplicate here). They are 140 characters or fewer, including punctuation, spaces and hashtags. Nowadays many poets are doing this, designating the verses micropoetry and/or poetweets. When I began creating them in May 2009, I labelled (and hashtagged) them tweetpoems. For sentimental reasons I still call them Tweet Poems here, though you can also find them tagged by the other labels, and on twitter I now hashtag them as poetweets.

At Obiri Rock

At Obiri Rock a woman,

chalked on dark stone, floated 

next to the orb of the moon.

Drawn hundreds of years ago,

her delicate lines have lasted.

Around Obiri, the sheltering scrub

was sparse, the grasses 

dotting bare earth. I wanted to be

an Aboriginal child long ago

running that ground.

Note: Obiri Rock is in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory. The drawings are in a shallow (but tall) cave created by an overhang. I have never seen a photograph of the particular images in the poem, though photos of the many other drawings there exist and can be found by Googling. The ones in the poem were apart, very high up, and not so sharp or detailed as others.

Submitted for dVerse Form For All: Poetry as Semaphore, in which Samuel Peralta (@Semaphore on twitter) invites us to create poems with verses of exactly 140 characters. I found that this discipline 'fixed' an old draft that wasn't quite working before.

My own twitter name is @SnakyPoet. I tend to use it (poetically) for short poems, where the whole poem is 140 characters or fewer, or else to link to longer poems on my blog.