The water: January tanka 2012

I’m alone tonight
watching a program on twins
how they are bonded
identical DNA
the self recognised and shared

4/1/12


hot rainy day
thunder blowing close
while you lie still
unsettled weather
weeping up a storm

10/1/12


rainy morning
the cats fight over breakfast
I chase them outside
they try to catch my eye
plaintive faces through the glass

17/1/12


Water Dragon year
begins with torrents of rain
following king tides
New Year is good for cleansing
the rivers keep on rising

24/1/12


the water
keeps on coming
funny
some people think
we can control nature

24/1/12


black feathers
on my doorstep
oh foolish night-bird
when I chased you away
from my cats I meant it!

27/1/12


end of the month
a long month of sorrow
and heavy rain
I come to it sighing
and spoiling for a fight

31/1/12

The clock ticks: January haiku 2012

her journals
have been deleted
so she’s gone

6/1/12


I keep ignoring
the smart-arse
why doesn’t he leave?

#lune

11/1/12


the clock ticks
he is tired again
and lies down

13/1/12


green cacti
rotted by mould
the black spot

20/1/12


Dragon’s blood incense
powerful for this New Year
the Water Dragon.

23/1/12


quiet
when the rain pauses
waiting

27/1/12

Respite Carer

For the first time

I call on emergency respite 

so I can go out:

chiropractor today,

doctor next week.

How will he cope with this,

being baby-sat like a child?

When I come home,

they are watching Shakespeare in Love.

She hasn’t seen it before.

‘You don’t have to leave,’ he says,

as she rises and gathers her bag.

‘Stay and watch the rest.’ 

She sits back down at once.

At the end, when she does leave,

they hug each other goodbye.

‘See you Monday!’

Submitted for Poets United Thursday Think Tank #81 - Goodbyes. 

Two Poems for Shelton Lea

Posted to accompany an article about Shelton for Poets United's 'I Wish I'd Written This'.


Yesterday

Yesterday

the book of your life arrived.

You're three years dead.

The author began the story

while you still had breath.

I am scarcely mentioned.

The first time we met

I showed you how to crush aspirin

in the bowl of a spoon,

inserting it through the wires

that held your broken jaw

as if I was feeding a baby.

This was at Mal's.

He showed you my poems.

You told me, 'Make the pauses

where the breath would naturally pause

if you were speaking it.

Shelley and Keats did that.'

I could go on listing anecdotes

piled up over twenty years.

But everyone has many yarns

of you, troubadour,

and most remain untold

except when old friends gather.

It's true I was not central

to your tale. Others, closer,

are also reduced to a line.

She has the essentials.

Still I find it strange

that you are dead and I'm gone.

7/9/07


Poems from a Peach Melba Hat

for its author, Shelton Lea (1946-2005)

I was tiny Abalone Press

operating alone from home

in the hours my kids were at school;

funded by Bill's diving money,

hence the name.

And it had a name by then.

You touted for ads for the end-papers,

a 19^th Century practice you revived,  

joyful to demonstrate

self-funding for poetry presses.

But two of the seven ads 

were Bill's and mine, ah well,

and one was your partner Christine's.

You wanted a matte pink board,

a delicate shade. You wanted

Joy Hester's painting

'Head of a Woman with Hat',

her splendid skewiff dignity

on your front cover. You got it.

And on the back 'Chloe' 

the famous nude 

from Young & Jackson's bar

with you, larrikin dandy, 

perched on the brass railing

protecting her frame.

The tenth Muse, you called her.

You came for two days

to consult on the layout

and stayed two weeks with pleurisy.

You thought to go straight back home,

all day on the rattly Gippsland train.

You thought it was just a cough.

Convalescent, you yarned with my boys,

explaining the shape of a fugue

and the reasons crime doesn't pay.

On both you were well-informed.

You were funny and wise 

and you heard them. 

They never forgot.

We argued over apostrophes.

Now I'd have let you leave them out,

but that was twenty-seven years ago.

I missed one, reading 'julias' –

personal name for a lawn, how quaint.

Till I heard you, too late, reciting 'julia's lawn'.

Some of the Establishment scoffed

at the excellent reviews,

insinuating partiality.

The street-wild poet, the very small press.

Who could praise so highly

and not be swayed 

by friendship or even lust?

We dressed very fine for the dinner,

the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

You were short-listed for two:

Poetry and Australiana. No, 

you didn't win. But the reviewers beamed

most politely on those who'd sneered.

Three years ago now, a boarder

stole my only copy when he left;

inscribed of course. My son David 

found me another, signed, 

in a second-hand bookshop.

I open it up. It begins: 

'the day was fifteen bright balloons'.

It ends with the line, 

'beware the greed of time.' 

Somewhere in the middle

you're coming out of prison 

on a winter day, hearing the Beatles:

'love, love me do.' And we do.

Published All Travellers We (Montmorency, Vic., Eaglemont Press, 2007.)

27/10/07

'Sad Am I Without Thee'

I liked the last turn of the last page
of the school choir songbook,
where we came to the Maori lament —
because it was beautiful: sweet
mournful notes and mellifluous
syllables of a foreign language,
finishing with the plaintive
long-drawn-out English: ‘Sad am I
without thee.’ We would sigh then
softly, on the last out-breath
before closing the book.

This is what comes to me now,
with your lingering death
finally accomplished, New Zealand girl.
Although you were not Maori,
perhaps you won’t mind that I return
to that most lonely and lovely lament
in my long memory, when I think of you.
Which at present is all the time.

I am sadness incarnate,
it lives in my body, shakes me
like the seizures you had,
doubles me over and throws me
into an absence of comfort, the pit
of black grief, abysmal
contemplation of
how young you were, Penelope.

I am old, but already
life calls me back to itself.
From the bedroom, my husband
in pain, is talking to me as if
I could hear, and I do hear
as he crashes to the floor.
I pick him up, massage his foot,
help him to the bathroom and back.
The cat on the bed murmurs
to greet me; I croon in return.
My body is crying for coffee.

You were here, you are gone.
I have spent all night
and half the morning weeping.
I know you loved me.
You knew I loved you.
I wanted to save
your stories and poems and paintings, but
the world is full of art.

Strangely, the world
is full of you. You can’t be cancelled.
I drink my coffee deep.
Tonight I shall watch
a show you would have liked too
on TV. Tonight
I’ll turn the next page. What comes after
‘Sad am I without thee’?


A 'page turner' poem submitted for dVerse / M:/P MAG collaboration.

Wet Spring: December haiku 2011

wet Spring
my parsley dies
anyway

1/12/11


fairytale mountains
misty in the crevices
outlines floating clear

2/12/11


Who comes silently
in the rain
glimpsed as a shadow?

5/12/11


the day is over
told the truth
and we all survived

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

he goes to bed now
head aching
a long kiss goodnight

#lunes

9/12/11


full moon eclipse night
overcast
we’re early to bed

#lune

10/12/11


sleeping cat
paw covering eye
‘Do Not Disturb’

16/12/11


the atheists
have all the best arguments
come to the same end

18/12/11


at SummerSolstice
all I ask of the Goddess
is my darling’s health

22/12/11


a quiet circle
as two old people
observe the Solstice

the earth quakes
a cyclone threatens
we breathe deep

guided by instinct
we pray for balance
and a good outcome

23-4/12/11


I read poetry
quietly
the porridge burns

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

when I was four
my first naked pink earthworm
so alien I ran screaming

28/12/11


poetry workshops
in Pentridge Prison
time of my life

(Details)

29/12/11



no Christmas greeting
yet no obituary
for her a new year?

31/12/11

As the Year Ends

not knowing she is atheist
he sends up a prayer

through air and ether to heaven
for the girl across the water

who now must be dead or near
whose spirit felt close last night

as if she hovered to read
a poem I could not write


An sequence of attempted Crystalline couplets, submitted for (and the form explained at) dVerse FormForAll — Couplets for the New Year — but I am still caught in this present ending.

Writing the Prison

(Acknowledgments to Anne Sexton’s “Ringing the Bells”)

And this is the way we go
to work in prison
and this is the gate where we stand
still for the metal-detector and open our bags
and open the books in our bags,
and these are the writers in prison
who wait for Friday,
two hours a week that feel like freedom;
and because we are working in poetry
and because that’s another country,
an open space outside what is known,
we are the circle of laughing poets
who lounge in the plastic chairs in the Education shed
and smile at the baffled officers
who watch but leave us alone,
who watch us escape
the gates and doors with locks;
and these are the bluestone blocks we pass
on the way into the prison
guarded by guns as if it were true
we are not free, we are not free;
and these are the tunnels we walk on Tuesday
in maximum security,
cages that whisper open electronically,
whisper open electronically and whisper closed;
and this is how the poetry shouts,
as outspoken and bold
as a fearless child,
and this is always my freedom responding
to the words that respond to the prison
where poets write and are free
two hours a week, on Tuesday or Friday,
when the door in the wall cracks open
and lets me in, and we meet;
and although I may work and go
out again through the tunnels and gates and locks,
I am the one who will never
escape the prison.


Written in 1987
First published La Mama Poetica anthology (Melb. University Press 1989)
Also in Walking the Dogs (Pariah Press anthology, 1994)
Included in the author's Secret Leopard: New and Selected Poems 1974-2005 (Paris, Alyscamps Press, 2005).

Posted here now because of a conversation in which this experience came up. A conversation in haiku, actually, at Haiku on Friday, on facebook.

Submitted to Poetry Pantry #81 at Poets United

I'm replete: December tanka 2011

suddenly onscreen
yellow gorse with prickly leaves
straight from my childhood
on the island growing wild
long time since I tramped that land

7/12/11


for dinner
our broccoli
newly picked
our own fresh herbs
in the omelette

12/12/11


My sixtyish friend
is visiting Zambia.
Young, she taught there —
now meets those women again.
Her glad email makes me cry.

13/12/11


the clover is out
all over the nature strips
at the corner house
steering the mower she laughs
and waves from her father’s lap

I trudge up the hill
tonight Basil the corgi
rests on his doorstep
I click my tongue as I pass
we’ve had two days of cuddles

old Coco spaniel
stops to let a car swerve past
then goes slow uphill
but I notice he’s faster
than old me puffing behind

20/12/11


I’m replete
contented
full
of everything
but poetry

Post-xmas #gogyohka

28/12/1

Submitted to dVerse Open Night #24 and Poets United's Poetry Pantry #81

Versatile Blogger Award

Mohana, who blogs at insanebloom, kindly awarded me this, weeks ago. Time I passed it on! The rules are:

1. Thank and link to the person who nominated you.
2. Share 7 random facts about yourself.
3. Pass the award on to 5 other bloggers.
4. Contact the winners to congratulate them.

The dilemma is, with so many wonderful blogging poets, how do I choose? And surely those I admire will have received it already? Also I don't want to double up on those I already gave the Stylish Blogger award, even though they deserve it. (That one I posted on another blog, to leave this for poems. This time I'm including the award here, thinking that more readers of poetry are likely to find it here.)

But before I list my chosen poets, I am supposed to reveal seven things about myself — things, I suppose, that you might not otherwise know or guess. (So the fact that I have cats wouldn't count, as anyone who reads my poems will find that out sooner or later.) Hmmm ...

Random facts about me:
(I don't promise they'll be interesting)

1. I have never had my appendix out.

2. When I was 15 I acquired two stepbrothers, both named Bill (i.e. both my parents remarried and each of their new spouses had a son called Bill).

3. Summer always takes me by surprise, in that I never quite get with the insect repellant in time to stop those first mosquito bites.

4. Everyone thinks my favorite colour is purple. I do love it, and love to wear it, but my real favourite colour to gaze upon is deep blue.

5. At university, I used to get Honours marks in (some) Philosophy subjects even though I was only doing a Pass degree.

6. I was a timid child and a shy, awkward teen. (No-one believes this, in the face of my adult outrageousness.)

7. Yes, I do know my fashion sense is eccentric. I like it, OK!

Here are my nominees for this award, with links to their blogs:

Brian Miller waystationone

Jenne’ R Andrews La Parola Vivace 

Brendan MacOdrum Oran’s Well

Lorna Cahall lorna cahall

Merlene Fawdry Poetry in the Rough

(If any of them turn out to have receive the award already, I'll find some replacements. With all the brilliant bloggers around, it won't be hard!)

Quilt

I made it when my kids were small.
It lay on our queen-size bed
all the further years of that long marriage.

Not your neat, traditional crochet squares
but larger, lacier, the pattern
more complex. I was proud

of this persevering work of my hands:
a fine thing, a whole year to make.
I loved its rich, strong colours.

It was variegated green, emerald to sage.
It was two tones of red, intense
and understated. And the wide borders

were black. I thought they gleamed
with power and love. The top, defined
by wider black, turned back over the pillow.

After the marriage ended in tears,
I folded the quilt away in a cupboard ...
bundled it off at last to the charity shop.

What comfort could it be to my old age?
Rage had turned it ugly in my sight.
Grief had made it lie too heavy on me.

Now I live in a warm climate. I like
the Indian cotton throw I bought:
lighter, freer, matching my present love.


Intended for dVerse Poetics: Fabric of our lives — but I was too late. Check the link anyway, for a diversity of good poetry!


Published in NOTES FOR THE TRANSLATORS: from 142 Australian and New Zealand Poets, ed. Christopher (Kit) Kelen. Macao, ASM, 2012 
and in THE d'VERSE ANTHOLOGY, 2013.