Tuesday Poem: "Striving and Scrambling, Clawing and Clattering"

When I was a young man,

I was hell-bent on making a name for myself,

don’t know where it came from

this cloying ambition,

this shard of self-promotion

stuck deep in my heart

Oh, to meet me you wouldn’t know it,

wouldn’t sense this striving

seething beneath my politeness and good breeding.

No, you would probably say,

if you thought to comment at all

to your companion at the time,

upon walking away and not being otherwise distracted by,

say, the play of the light on the sun-tawny hills

or the way a passing young woman’s dark curl strayed

across her forehead

that “there goes a sensible young man with dreams,

sure enough, but dreams rooted in pragmatism”.

But all the while, I would be clamped down

on the ashes of envy, bitter against

the roof of my mouth and I would covet

what you had, my Jekyll and Hyde shadow

reaching out

to knock you from your perch.

Tuesday Poem: "Poem for Ilana"

Like the tree for which you were named,

you combine the aesthetic with the practical.

Your principles stand firm

in the buffeting winds of peer pressure,

you offer the weak and voiceless

the shelter of your humanity

as branches beckon the birds,

you bear the fruit of your personality,

growing with each year

and proudly tended and harvested

by your loved ones,

you send out new shoots and tendrils

to embrace the shape of experience

and inhale the oxygen of knowledge,

you grow upward, ever upward

in anticipation of the limitless sky

and when you smile,

we behold it with the same joy

as awakening to the first blossoms of Spring.

I wrote this poem many years ago when I was working for a South African Jewish family on a moshav in northern Israel. Ilana was their teenage daughter and she was only a couple of years away from having to do her compulsory two year military service that most young Israelis must do when they turn eighteen. Ilana is Hebrew for tree, an appropriate name for someone growing up in a horticultural environment.

Please excuse the late posting, but school holidays can be all-consuming for a parent.

Tuesday Poem: "Strike!"

Restless fisherwomyn,

don't cast into the darkness

of the future,

your fretted brow

played like an instrument of torture.

Wading into the clear, fast-flowing stream

of consciousness,

you look not at the glinting dance

of dawn upon the water

but over your shoulder at the glowering night

that hangs on to the horizon

with whitened knuckles

and breathes on your neck

its snaking, insidious gases,

issuing from its swampy maw

fetid with fear.

Nervous fingers catalogue your flies,

here the feathers of your commitment

frayed and threadbare,

there a once sparkling spinner

now tarnished with disappointment

and you wonder,

sighing as you survey the eddies,

where will it strike

and do you have the lure?

I lie,

deep in the aquamarine,

the sun filtering through the shimmering surface,

firing the melody of my rainbow markings

as I ripple my body,

flicking my tail just enough

against the current

to hold myself as still as the now.

And when I strike your shining lure

you will know my savage momentum

brooks no hesitation,

never contemplates going back

and buries the hook

into the bony jawbone of belief. 

Welcome back to Tuesday Poem after the Southern Hemisphere summer hiatus. Do take the time, if you have it to spare, to read all the wonderful Tuesday poets.

Unfortunately, we denizens of Christchurch got a Christmas present from Mother Nature that we would rather not have unwrapped. More big earthquakes. I'd be a liar if I pretended the ongoing seismic activity didn't wear down our resilience.

But I hope that elsewhere you had a lovely Christmas and a restful holiday.