Tuesday Poem: "Triptych: Hope, Bond, Loss"

1.                                                                         

A flower opens in the dawn.

Drink the dew,

dispel the night,

feel the warming of a new light.

We go under different names,

but only one sun warms us.

The rainbow is but the refraction

of pure white light.

2.

You are awash in me,

that singing sea

that gives me beauty without artifice,

forgiveness without guilt

and love without qualification.

3.

One day

while beachcombing

I will come upon a magnificent conch

and putting it to my ear

I will hear your voice

calling me through the honey of history.

Then an urge will seize me

and putting the conch to my lips

I will sound a single sad note

to carry the stream of my tears

across the ocean.

The poet wishes to acknowledge Valley Micropress in whose pages this poem first appeared.

Tuesday Poem: "Kissing the Cobra"

(For Marg and Laurice, snake charmers extraordinaire)

  

Like the Burmese priestess

kissing the cobra

I must never take my eyes off

that steely, staring, coal-black serpent eye

Iest the fangs swaying in that unborn smile

strike

in the split-second

that contains my salvation or my undoing.

Lips always poised between heaven and hell,

I advance on the servant of knowledge

hooded with an assumed mastery,

that hood branded with Nature's tattoo:

Omega, the end

and that flickering tongue that reads my body

temperature could cut it cold.

Cold as the smooth-bumpy reptilian snout

upon which I lightly lay

the final kiss.

The poet wishes to acknowledge Valley Micropress in whose pages this poem first appeared.

Aftermath

It is now six weeks since an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale hit my home city of  Christchurch.

I was in Auckland working when the earthquake struck so, naturally, I was very worried about the safety of my family who were experiencing this frightening event. I don't know whether it was worse to be going through the earthquake with my family or being separated from them.

It has been a strange time in the aftermath of this natural disaster. All the schools were closed for the first week and then, when I was hoping to re-establish some "normality" in my life, my oldest son got sick for this entire week. Then the whole family got sick in the latter half of this week.

Things have got back to some kind of "normal", but conversations are still peppered with quake talk and many people are in limbo waiting for decisions on their damaged land and homes. Sometimes it feels like a mini-Katrina, but I don't think we've been quite as neglected.

Many lovely old buildings are in ruins, many people have lost their livelihoods, streets are still blocked off in the central city and just when we think it's over, Mother Nature gives us another aftershock as if it say, "Ha, ha, fooled you!"

The aftermath will go on for a very long time I am surmising.

Tuesday Poem: "Headlights"

“Poetry’s for poofters, innit?”
A square jaw

thrustwobbling out of sagging jowls

to menace my airspace.

The first assault,

olfactory.

Saliva hops into my bitter dominion.

Draw breath, draw back

as knuckles whiten

and eyes glaze with a lust

for facial architecture.

“Excuse me, I think I left my car headlights on.”

The poet wishes to acknowledge Valley Micropress in whose pages this poem first appeared.

Tuesday Poem: "Translation"

TRANSLATION

In Memory of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)

Liberte¢, egalite¢, fraternite¢ -

you put your courage where your pen was

and poetry bloomed in Flanders Field

alongside the poppies.

With Owen and Sassoon, you rescued

the soldier-poet from antiquity

and wrought from mud and blood

the words that gave the lie to

The War to End All Wars.

You fell just as the race was nearly run

and France wept copiously to lose a favourite son.

Translation - a flawed art,

but perhaps no more flawed

than any art or, indeed,

any science.

Was it Frost that said:

“What is lost in translation is the poetry”?

Any smith learns the limitations of his materials

yet still he pushes them to breaking point.

Translator of the heart,

you took us to the Zone

where the sacred was profane

and the heavenly mundane.

Only the poet dares to look down

as Christ “ascends beyond the aviators”

because the poet knows that

life is a found object

and in any language the greatest gift

is the silence between the words.

NOTE: The phrase quoted from Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire comes from a new translation by John A. Scott which appeared in Meanjin, Volume 48, Number 4, 1989 Summer.

The poet wishes to acknowledge Valley Micropress in whose pages an alternate version of this poem first appeared.