Inner Workings

Prompt: looking below the surface

My electronic washing machine
sings to me when it’s finished a load.
My doorbell too, when pressed,
regales me with a tune.
And every mobile phone
sounds its personal music.

What does this express –
a pleasant conceit, or hubris?
To what do we aspire
in making our digital world?
Was not the Universe
created by a tone?

It Slips Down Suddenly

Prompt: The unexpected

It slips down suddenly
into a black pit, sliding
out of the top of my mind
and vanishing, between
one moment and the next –
a name I’ve known
for 25 years, just gone.

I know quite well
the person of that name,
his place in my history,
his place in his own.
I can picture his face and form
in front of me now, I can see
the clothes he usually wore.

But down the deep hole
where that name has fallen,
there is no pursuit
there is no retrieval,
no hook long enough
to reach and bring it up.
This crevasse is bottomless.

Is that how it happens,
so quick and easy?
Only a moment before,
something is there as always,
known and about to be said –
and then it’s an absence, as if
it had blanked out years ago.

Don't You Miss Going To See the New Star Trek Movie, Hear!

I didn’t want it to stop
until it did stop, perfect
in its unforgettable conclusion,
and I threw my fist into the air
raising Andrew’s arm with mine –
we’d been holding hands throughout.
He gripped mine tightly and laughed
as I exulted: “Yeah!”

Wednesday prompt: "Don't you ..."

Opening darkness: haiku for April 2009

3/4/09

The rain is roaring
drowning out the surf’s thunder.
North and south, there’s floods.


10/4/09

The cloud-covered moon
the full moon, at 2 am
showed herself, I danced.

**************************

I'm full of poems,
long ones, crowding out haiku –
but soon miss my friends.


16/4/09

sunrise
and the vast river
waiting


17/4/09

A fine new morning:
sunshine after days of rain.
We wake, smile, embrace.


22/4/09

White noise
and outside the sea
booming.

******************

opening darkness
seeds half realizations
first widening blooms

******************

wild ocean tonight
thundering, coming down hard
and foaming the dunes

******************

A poem in tanka form, with senryu feel, about haiku:

Haiku on Friday (MySpace)

I started the group
so I’d learn to write haiku
from skilled friends who joined.
They are skilled, I’m still learning –
but I’m seen as an expert!


24/4/09

Tibetan Prayer Flags

At length the weather
will erase what is written.
Prayers are renewed.

**********************

Earth Day

We wake to sunlight
and the planet still here
the morning after.

On the other hand ...

Enjoy what we have!
Sweet awakening today,
and how much longer?

- Devil's Advocate


25/4/09

Dawn Service, Anzac Day

At Gallipoli
a bugle sounds the Last Post
then comes Reveille.
Old enemies, side by side
remember, and pray for peace.


29/4/09

To Sandra
(for her profile page on MySpace)

You’re a restful place
for me to come and visit
sometimes … it’s enough.

************************

Bright green lorikeet
flashes past me as I walk,
vanishes in tree.

Festival

Over there
they’ve just done Beltane,
the Rites of Spring.
Here, we had Samhain –
autumnal, dark.

There were two Beltanes
for me one year,
the year I travelled
to that country:
visiting poet.

There I met poets,
there I met witches;
both were my kin,
both embraced me,
and Spring was sweet!

I shared Beltane
with a new coven
in West Texas.
A coyote howled
from the near desert.

The High Priestess
my soul sister
played guitar and sang.
We spoke poems.
The wind swirled loud.

Back at home
the night of the dead
went on without me.
This time, that Spring
is ghost at the feast.


Now that the April Poem A Day challenge is over, Robert Lee Brewer on Poetic Asides is giving us a series of "Wednesday prompts". This first one is: Spring.

Farewell (April Challenge 30)

Prompt (for the last day of the challenge): Farewell.


Fare thee well! and if for ever,
Still for ever, fare thee well
- Byron


“Go well,” my friend Maureen always says
instead of goodbye – like a blessing,

the true meaning of “farewell”. I never feel
finality in leaving her, I feel her care for me

and its foreverness. Her words go forward with me,
a mantle of protection. As I travel forth from her

I am warmed; her loving wishes accompanying me
in benediction, and not for that moment only:

Love is my companion, attending all my journeys,
all my dailiness … until we meet again!

Never Fear (April Challenge 29)

Prompt: "Never (blank)" and fill in the blank.

“Have no fear,”
the angel said in measured tones.
"Have no fear. He is well.”

I’d been so frantic –
my youngest,
his first time away from Australia
entirely on his own,
the great world trip,and he’d hit trouble.

Mind you, he was 29
but all the same,
naïve enough
to get drugged and robbed
at his first port of call:
Bali.

You can imagine –
my lurid fantasies
soon had him set up and framed
and tossed indefinitely
into a dire Indonesian prison.
(Never mind that he was the complainant.)

Unable to settle,
I went and cast circle
in the big room I had in those days
as my home temple.
I did it the Ceremonial Magic way,
calling the Archangels.

Surprisingly, a voice –
yes, in my head, but so clear and strong
I was almost sure it was physical.
Well, and come to that,
it wasn’t in my head, it was over there,
only I was hearing it telepathically.

“Rosemary,” it said,
“We wish to speak with you.”
I managed not to pass out.
Trying to do whatever might be
correct in these circumstances,
I mentally designated Gabriel spokesman.

I turned to face West
and waited.
“Have no fear,” the angel said,
“He is well.”
That was it. End of message.
And my fear left.

It was enough.
It carried with it
clarity and calm,
an unusual, particular peace –
alert, awake, and very grounded.
“… that passeth all understanding,” I thought.

I have learned since
to know that quality, which is palpable,
as heralding the presence of angels –
angels in whose presence I feel
both peaceful and strong;
beings of few words but essential.

“Have no fear,” the angel said.
I do have fear. I am human.
Sometimes I forget.
I forget that I don’t need it.
I forget that the energy of fear
itself can cause problems.

(I don’t mean healthy, sensible fear,
like if a bull’s chasing you
you’d better run.
I mean that other kind
which is useless of course
and makes everything worse.)

“Never” seems so large.
Try it in the moment:
“Have no fear.”

Anti-Sestina Poem / Mothers and Sons (April Challenge 28)

Prompt: Write a sestina and/or a poem about the sestina form.

Anti-Sestina Poem

Kipling did it, Pound did it,
half the poets around did it –
but let’s not try doing it,
let’s not write sestinas.

John Ashbery did it, Elizabeth Bishop did it,
Dante, Petrarch and Philip Sidney did it.
But why should I do it?
I don’t like sestinas!


(However I did it, and here's the result:)


Mothers and Sons

The neighbour’s been out drinking tonight.
Now he is home, yelling at his mother.
My husband wants to call the police
but I hear her standing up for herself.
As far as we know he’s not violent.
It’s an old grudge from when he was a child.

I know what it’s like. I have a child
who used to drink late into the night,
sometimes barely restraining his violent
rage against me, the evil mother
who lied to him and even to herself –
or so he believed, becoming my thought police.

He’s the one I can never please,
although he was a sweet and loving child
and we thought had sufficient love for himself
also, but now his moods can be dark as night.
I’ve been in the place of that other mother.
Her son’s yelling is a kind of violence.

And violence unfortunately begets violence.
In my case I almost had to police
my reactions, remind myself I was a mother
and this loud, hard man was once the child
who used to cry himself to sleep at night
after his dog died. My neighbour herself

has told me a similar story. She says herself
that her son has a soft and a dark side. He’s a shy violet
when he hasn’t been drinking. But Wednesday night
is his night at the Club. The local police
drink there too off duty, he’s often chilled
with them before coming home to yell at his mother.

Was I indeed a very bad mother?
I suppose we all wonder that about ourselves.
Isn’t it the parent’s fault when something ails the child?
I remember him broken-hearted, sobbing violently.
Now he never says sorry, he never says please.
I’m reminded of all that, as I listen tonight.

He is the child for whom I’m a failed mother,
and I’m hearing tonight a woman like myself
abused violently by a son she can’t please.

A Serious Miscommunication (April Challenge 26)

Prompt: Miscommunication.

Found poem. Fragments from interviews with survivors of the Marysville fires.

It was gathering momentum as it went,
the front flying with that wind.

Telephone line congestion.
Two-way radio system heavily overloaded.

On a day like that, hit quickly while it’s small.
Enough tankers, you may contain it.

I questioned whether our tanker should go elsewhere, but
you fight the fire you’ve got, not the one you might have.

I don’t know where the gap in the information is,
I really don’t know the answer to that one.

By 4.30 there were burning embers,
gumnuts falling in the mill and sheets of bark.

The Mt Gordon fire spotter saw what was coming
and the speed. He stayed there and kept giving warnings.

Told me to get out. “We’re going to come under
severe ember attack at any moment.”

The list of people who needed help was small.
There were people who should have been on the list.

I had no idea of the size and the speed it was travelling.
The first warning was not till twenty-five to six.

We didn’t know what it was, which direction it was coming,
it was mounting even as you looked at it.

“We’ve spoken to the police and this is just
smoke from somewhere else.”

“What are all those red spots? “ “That’s because the sun
is high in the sky.” I accepted that!

It was like a normal day
except for the heat and the cloud of smoke.

So fast. Official warnings
were running behind the fire.

One report we had was that houses
were not under threat. We knew it wasn’t true.

We had to say they are,
against what the CFA* was saying.

Perhaps a radio, some sort of screeching
saying “Emergency! Emergency!”

Possibly, whatever you were doing,
you’d think, “That’s strong,” and listen.

We tried. We couldn’t get through the official ropes,
couldn’t get regional HQ by telephone or radio.

We saw smoke, we tried to get information from websites.
The power went out, we lost the computer.

I had no idea of the size of what it was we were facing
and I don’t think anyone else did.

There’s two people I’d dearly loved
to have got that message.

What do people think the siren’s there for? To call firefighters
to the station to go and address a fire, that’s what it’s there for.

They remained in their houses because there was no siren
to have gone loud and continuously.

People would have said, “What’s happening?”
and they would have moved.

I kept saying, “I haven’t heard the siren.”
Apparently nowadays they don’t use the siren.

The CFA pages them –
but what about the rest of us?

She drove up and down the streets, yelling,
“We’ve got about ten minutes to get out.”

There were people who wanted to stay. Didn’t get out in time.
They had no idea of the ferocity.

At twenty to seven an official red flag alert,
the only one that day. Wind change.

We knew we had big trouble. The fire
would blow across the town fast. Time was really short.

We drove up and down a few roads with sirens going
and in minutes it was dark, with embers in the town.

It was getting noisy and dark. Out on spot fire patrol
I lost my mobile phone, my link to my family.

I did try to ring from another phone, didn’t get
an answer, didn’t know what had happened.

Fire crews at the oval. Nothing they could do.
The town was going up around them.
Thirty people died, most in or near their houses,
some in cars. Some called Triple-O for help.

There was nowhere to go. Maybe they got out.
There wasn’t a lot we could do by then.

People trapped in cars, people trapped in houses,
and for ninety percent of the calls, nothing anyone could do.

Not notified of their daughter’s death
for weeks, but reports confirmed their fears.

A young pregnant woman’s body on the road.
Eight months pregnant. Couldn’t outrun.

Compulsory evacuation should be mandatory,
especially on days of total fire ban. 

We need communications and evacuation procedures.
Why are they saying, “Stay and defend, or not”?

People stayed on that fateful night, and they died.
They just didn’t know the fire was coming.

* Country Fire Authority

Longing (April Challenge 27)

Out of sequence – I just haven't had time yet to write the one I have planned for Number 26. So for 27 I thought I'd try a shadorma, which has the virtue of being short - even when doubled!)
Prompt: Longing

I seem now
strangely free of it.
Can it be
that I’ve found
contentment – or apathy?
Or simply ageing?

Whatever,
I like this freedom –
memory
without pain,
while knowing that I’ve relished
all life’s rich flavours.

Andrew's 80th (April Challenge 25)

Prompt: An event (think party).
(This is a double Anacreontic verse.)

The night was stormy.
Rain and flood
prevented some,
others braved
a scary highway.
Maureen climbed up
to disconnect
the smoke alarm,
set off by cooking.
Omni brought
dinkum gem scones.
(Before shaman
she was bush cook.)
Debbie brought
the dancing music:
jive and twist
and Neil Diamond.
The birthday cake
was chocolate mud;
Maureen made it.

Andrew’s niece,
the lovely Lindy,
flew from Melbourne.
Jokes: by plane
or was it a broom?
Andrew danced
with me and Deb.
The smile on his face
grew wider all night.
He gave a speech
that made us laugh
and made us cry.
“We love you, Andrew,”
shouted Sharon.
Stand-up comic
Dinah emceed,
very rude,
we loved her stuff.
James recorded
it all on Flip.