Tuesday Poem: "Sonnet for My Jailer"

I never was a man to be restrained,

I looked for no horizon’s easy grin.

I thought that love demands a soul enchained,

The sleeper wakes, enchanted but hemmed in.

No prison could be sweeter than your mouth,

No sentence could be longer than your lashes;

And even in the wasted, icy south,

No wind could turn our fire, love, to ashes.

Though marriage is a word some use with scorn

And say the groom is cowered by her tongue;

Perhaps they waken to a dream stillborn

And never hear love’s music truly sung.

If you’re my jailer, throw away the key,

For locked within your heart I am set free.

My apologies to readers and fellow poets, I was away in the wilds of Takamatua on the beautiful Banks Peninsula as a Parent Helper with my son's Outdoor Education camp. The weather was glorious. So caught up was I in the preparation for it, that I forgot to schedule a poem posting for Tuesday so here it is 3 days late.

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

Tuesday Poem: "Following Your Heart"

When the wind changes direction,

do your friends say that she is fickle?

Wheeling and soaring, the hawk searches

the sky's silent patterns for

whirlpools and eddies in the liquid blue,

following only the pulse of knowing that rises

in her breast and eye,

reading the ochre outcrops, the granite crags,

the shale shards and basalt buttresses,

the myriad forms of the thrusting, restless earth

that catch and shape the wind and sun,

melding invisible columns of power for the taking.

Fierce, steady eyes

scrutinise that patchwork of pIay,

tapping its effortless buoyancy

when the powerful sinew tires.

Like the hawk, you follow

the knowing,

wed to heart and bone

by the seamless lineage of trust and instinct.

That is the true voice

you hear

when you glide and ride

the pillar of easeful power:

the true voice

for the voices of your friends

can no longer be heard up here.

Tuesday Poem: "Lover Without Cover"

When we flirt, we flirt with danger

and we must take great care that

that which simmers in our loins does not

explode in our faces.

It’s adrenalin/nitro,

an unstable mix.

Tip the balance and everybody gets hurt.

I know I’m vulnerable, ripe for the plucking,

a bird on the wire

trilling for the thrilling,

but we’d better figure out

whose goose we’re killing.

I don’t blame the wine, I blame myself.

Too easy to run my hands over the silk of you,

to want to taste the milk of you,

to plunder your lips while your husband sleeps

one step closer to heaven.

Like a cat-burglar,

I’ve breached the foyer

of this plush inner-city apartment building.

Working clandestine hours, stealthy, always gloved,

riding the high of the risk of discovery.

But taking the greater risk is the homeowner

uninsured against heartache.

Tuesday Poem: "Song of the Self-Exile"

What conflicts would you have me reconcile?

I’ll harmonise your bittersweet refrain.

Let’s sing the wistful song of self-exile

and gaze into the mirror of our pain.

For forty years, Moses, you have wandered

to wind up here complaining of the sand.

But how many chances have you squandered

to build your own, not find your promised land?

Do you look to this landscape for succour

and lament its lack of comforting green?

Where’s Aoraki to make the sky pucker?

Where are the kauri cathedrals serene?

I know the lakes of glass that keenly call,

but could there lurk beneath a taniwha?

One silver thread is missing from the pall,

not feeling white but feeling Pakeha. 

The hooks of blood are tearing at our flesh.

As one we clamour, stammer and revile.

But pay the price of love and look afresh,

though dry and red, these ancient charms beguile.

A longing in the shadow of your smile,

remembering the lover you first kissed.

Let’s sing the wistful song of self-exile

as Aotearoa calls through the mist.

While living in Perth, I met a fellow Kiwi called Alison Moses (too great a surname not to use symbolically) who had a great deal of ambivalence about her adopted homeland despite having lived there for several years. I wrote this for her and as a reflection of my own ambivalence. The call of home, family ties and one's own culture can be very strong.