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.

Poem of the week: ENDANGERED by Andrew M. Bell | Phantom Billstickers

Poem of the week: ENDANGERED by Andrew M. Bell | Phantom Billstickers

Tuesday Poem: "Spring Comes Early to the Fridge"

Ice arcs through the air
like solid lightning.

The large bolts strike with a rumble

and clatter to rest

where they gleam with bravado

at the dispirited winter sun.

The small bolts explode

with a skittering hiss

and trickle down between the bricks,

prodigal drops returning to the watertable.

Cast out from its plastic host,

the ice bears grooved testimony to their symbiosis,

but this testimony concedes to the crafting thaw

a bevel smoother than a human hand could fashion.

Some ice lies clustered on the brick paving

like terra incognita wrought on a vellum map

by the feverish imagination of an Olde World explorer.

Some lies scattered among the purple and white alyssum

in imitation of a Tyrolean spring.

As a breeze releases

the olfactory history of myriad fridge dwellers,

a cloth rings over a wire tray

in a crude arpeggio which segues into

the basso profundo of the resurrection hum.

The cycle begins anew.

The poet wishes to acknowledge The Western Review (Western Australia) in whose pages this poem first appeared.

Tuesday Poem: "The Crucible"

Father, you are the blueprint of my soul,
And though I sense our parting drawing near,

The crucible of death will make us whole.

The day or hour is not ours to control

Yet even strangers read your passing here.

Father, you are the blueprint of my soul.

In paradise's fields I see a knoll

Where, shucked of flesh, we sport without a care,

The crucible of death will make us whole.

As age and weight make diamond from the coal,

So I am fashioned from your smile and tear,

Father, you are the blueprint of my soul.

I will not dread the shedding of my role,

A promise waits beyond the footlights' glare,

The crucible of death will make us whole.

So, father, do not fear to pay the toll,

I am the sun, your shadow I revere.

Father, you are the blueprint of my soul.

The crucible of death will make us whole.


The poet wishes to acknowledge the Naked Eye anthology (Western Australia) in whose pages this poem first appeared.

Tuesday Poem: "Lake Toba, 28 June 1993"

LAKE TOBA, 28 June 1993

The lake is smoothed jade after the rain

and only the commercial flotsam

of a lonely plastic Aqua bottle is adrift

on untrammelled waters.

A butterfly of the kind we usually see pinned and dead

drifts by

like me, enjoying the return of the sun,

“mata hari”, the eye of the sky

shining fiercely like Hanuman

from a leaden countenance.

Boys fool by my verandah view offering

to sell me a girl.

The travellers pass through like capsules,

pausing only to bleed money into outstretched palms.