Passages

Sometimes, working late, I hear

a thump on the door, and think,

'There's my old cat wanting to come in' 

though I know it isn't, and can't be, 
and won't. Never again. My cat is dead.

***

Deep night.

That mournful sound:

faintly, a plane going over

high and alone up there,

droning its way away

dwindling into distance.

***

That tree, a weed not pulled,

grew fast, filling my skyline.

I try to remember now, and can’t –

had it even begun as a tiny shoot
when he was still here to see?

(Written as separate gogyoshi, then I discerned a theme.)

Linked to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #280

Surviving the Going On

Keep no promises to the dead.

That is a book that can't be read.

Life's path meanders; pages turn.

Time and new circumstance will burn all that you said.

You'll become a different you.

And the dead one is changing too.

The life here retreats to the past.

The soul says goodbye, and at last goes somewhere new.

The dead don't need or heed your word.

They leave who they were; you're unheard.

Death may be peaceful or violent.

No matter: to remain silent is not absurd.

It's otherwise while they're dying.

Speak loud, let the words come flying.

Promise anything that they ask.

Comfort, then, is your only task – even lying.

Later, let yourself be absolved.

Cycles of grief will have revolved.

There will come time to pause, look back.

You'll see that, walking this long track, you have evolved.

Survival IS the going on.

Move forward, beyond what is gone.

If you are still alive, then live!

That's the best, only gift to give to your loved one.

Written for Poets United's Midweek Motif: Survival. The suggested topic has to do with surviving violence. I have little experience of that. Instead, the first line of this poem jumped into my head and I went from there. I have been widowed a little over three years. In fact, no promises were asked or made at his dying – and if he had asked anything from me, it would have been exactly what I say in the final verse. But perhaps I had subconscious stuff to evolve from. And I do see that I have evolved. It may seem a cynical poem, but it feels positive.

The form is a Florette: a recent prompt from dVerse, which I didn't have time to address until now. To make every line a finite sentence was my own addition, for some unconscious reason – something to do with the finality of death, perhaps.

You Were a Face in a High Window, Watching

You looked out over the back yard, checking.

Were the lines of washing still propped up,

a forked stick braced on earth pushing them skyward?

Face in the mirror – here are you, staring out again

in my own contours and expressions:

a living ghost. (I understand you better now.)

High over my life I think your soul will keep on gazing,

window of sky through to forever, while I live.
Watching. Looking out for me, not the washing.

A word acrostic for Play it Again #23 at 'imaginary garden with real toads', partly inspired by Ingrid Jonker's 'Ladybird' and partly by Bjorn Rudberg's 'time travel' prompt which asks us to include past, present and future.

The photo and its copyright belong to me by right of inheritance, and should not be reproduced without permission. 

High Temperatures

I turn the fans up to 3,

I pour myself another

fine cold ginger beer.

All day I have shut out

the advancing heat, 

but now it rushes 

the barriers, pours in 

through tiny cracks.

The Big Hot should always

come on a Saturday afternoon

of no appointments or duties.

There is nothing I need to do

but sleep or read, or write 

an unimportant poem –

shutting from my mind 

what is sure to come:

tonight's TV news 

telling me where the fires 

have blackened today.


Luckily that last didn't happen, but we are warned of high fire danger – as so often in an Aussie summer.

Five days later – death and devastation in two States.

Linked to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #279

Home is a River

Cataract Gorge in flood 2003. Photo by Aaroncrick 

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

River light moves flashing

almost faster than the eye,

lilting, sparkling silver,

where the boats come round the bend.

Their keels break the water

into fragments dancing bright

like swift, slippery fish, or

iridescent dragonflies.

Night-times on the hilltop,

from my window I kept watch

across the clumped houses

and the dark shapes of the trees

down into the harbour,

that blank, flat, round-edged bowl

of dark pierced by moonlight –

seeming still, but still alive.

Higher up, the rapids

in the rocky gorge frothed white

over big black boulders

in between high canyon walls.

We climbed the crevices

using grass tufts and toe-holds,

not children but pirates

or explorers of the wild.

I live by a river

half across the country now:

warmer, wider, slower,

with a softer, bluer sheen.

I ask myself often

how I came to be so blessed,

smiling at its beauty

which is constant sustenance.

The cold stream of childhood

with its steep and stony banks

gave me reassurance,

guardian of my town and me.

Then life moved me elsewhere

and I couldn’t hear its voice.

Now another river

tells me, ‘Dear, this too is home.’

My own photo of the Tweed River near Murwillumbah. 
© Rosemary Nissen-Wade 2015. All rights reserved. 

Linked to Poets United's Midweek Motif: River

Bears and Elephants

Elephants and bears hold grudges, hiding in trees, waiting, pistons pumping — from “ARTIFICIAL WILDLIFE SANCTUARY” by Craig Rebele. Quote found in The Bibliomancy Oracle

1.

I gave my small bear, named Red for his hue,

to Teo, three.

I spoke to Red mind to mind, to explain

this had to be.

A boy just starting to talk needs a bear

far more than me.

Red went away without a backward glance.

‘You’re boring,’ he thought at me. ’Now I’ll dance.’

2.

In my friend’s neat unit, the elephants

both large and small

are scattered all over. She bought not one.

‘Gifts,’ she said. ‘All’.
They have different colours and attitudes,
all beautiful.

The largest lifts a sideboard on his back.

His narrowed eyes tell me he loathes the work.

Written for 'The Eye of the Beholder – Micro Poetry' at imaginary garden with real toads'. We're allowed to write more than one; I hope it's permissible to write two together!

Form: Cavatina

The photos are mine and must not be reproduced. © Rosemary Nissen-Wade 2015

A Bus Ride with Van Gogh

I pass the cane fields, some of the cane still standing, some burnt back to the bare, blackened ground. A few have tiny new plants already growing. In the background are wooden houses on stilts, ramshackle, dotted across the landscape, distant from each other behind clumpy dark trees. The sky is awash with low grey cloud. We cross a bridge. The wide flat river is likewise grey.

In Vincent's landscape, here on my iPad, the fields are rolling waves of colour – vivid blue and green, splashes of sunny gold. The sky is riotous too, only a little lighter, as if reflecting the land. A haystack nestles in front of a cluster of houses, all of them white-walled and blue-roofed. The Autumn trees are orange and gold. 

The scene I am passing through alters to high-rise city – shops, offices, tenements. The walls are beige or grey, the roofs dark red or brown. 

These contrasts deceive. I am travelling towards our Summer country. Northwards, the further we go the more the sky lightens, becoming suffused with sun.

sad or mad –

yet in pulsing colour

he paints joy

Image: View of Church of Saint Paul de Mausole, by Vincent Van Gogh


Written for dVerse Haibun Monday 3

Linking this to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #281 (December 6 2015)

The Point of It

Now that I have attained

a measure of tranquility,

now that time has elapsed

and I come to some kind of terms

with the ongoing inescapable fact

of grief, and the equally intransigent

need to continue living my whole life, fully –

I’d like to talk to you of all that, discuss

the interesting aspects, this learning

to be alone and like it. We could mull it over

together, dwell on the complications,

end up having a laugh (as we often did).

That would be a good measure of tranquility,
wouldn't it? But the point is to manage alone.



Written in response to Poets United's Midweek Motif: Tranquility — but I lost internet connection for some time before being able to link to that prompt, so offer it for The Poetry Pantry #277 instead).

Entering the House of Death

This wet Spring night
I cross the dark threshold

to meet with you –

a union more intense
than our Beltane revels.

A Jisei (death poem) which forms a companion piece to an earlier one, as well as marking a personal Pagan ritual.

Linked to The Tuesday Platform for 10 Nov. 2015 at 'imaginary garden with real toads'