Tuesday Poem: "Switchfoot"

for my mother, Joan

Surfers have a word

for those select few whose ambidexterity

lets them lead with either foot,

always facing their aqueous dance partner.

We call it “switchfoot”

and this defiance of dominance is revered.

Some surfers practise for years,

enduring endless wipeouts to master that moment

when the switch becomes effortless,

a Zen scissored glide as smooth

as the wave they are now facing.

Mother, do you remember that moment

when we switched feet?

Now the child leads the parent towards

that white maelstrom that awaits us all

at the end of our ride.

Tuesday Poem: "It Will Always Be"

the soft white parchment

of your skin

on which I write my desire,

the sensual prow

of your hips

which steers me homeward,

the sun-warmed wine press

of your thighs

that urges the juices from my skin,

the billowing clouds

of your breasts

that obscure me from the mundane,

the fragrant garden

of your mouth

from which I drink a heady scent,

my heart that you hold in your hand.

Sorry for the late posting, but I've been sick the last two days with a stomach bug.

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.

Tuesday Poem: "Eclipse"

For Lucy (aged 5)

For that moment

my heart froze

my breath stopped

and in that merest sliver of time,

a drop in the ocean of pleasure

I find in your company,

the sunshine fell under shadow,

clouded by a vision of a world without you.

At five

we all believe that nothing can touch us

as we run headlong at the world

wanting to stretch ourselves in every direction,

wanting to soak up everything like a giant sponge,

wanting to run up rainbows,

wanting to dance on clouds,

wanting to sing mountains into being,

wanting to cross rivers on our laughter

and taste and smell and touch our dreams. 

I see you,

little golden girl,

running so hard along these seaside pavements

until you wish you could fly

but for one terrifying moment

as you stood in the middle of that road

I saw you flying away forever,

taking away our sunshine.

I must apologise for the lateness of my posting this week, but the headlong rush to Christmas is, perhaps, a madness I could do without.

Tuesday Poem: "Five Clerihews"

Marilyn Monroe

had fame not fun though.

She took some pills, they couldn’t wake her.

Perhaps she should have stayed Norma Jean Baker.

James Dean

was suave and cut clean,

but when they pulled him from the car

I bet his looks weren’t movie star.

Saint Joan of Arc

lit the spark

which fired a nationalist feud.

The French canonised her, the English barbequed.

Marlon Brando

stayed his hand though

Cheyenne was badly beaten.

It took the gun of his son, Christian but Tahitian.

Madonna Louise Ciccone

has proved herself quite a show pony.

She mixed Marilyn’s image with coney tits

and made a squillion from her hits.

Something a bit light-hearted this week. According to that fount of all online knowledge, Wikipedia, "a clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley."


Also, according to Wikipedia, "a clerihew has the following properties:

• It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it pokes fun at mostly famous people
• It has four lines of irregular length and metre (for comic effect)
• The rhyme structure is AABB; the subject matter and wording are often humorously contrived in order to achieve a rhyme, including the use of phrases in Latin, French and other non-English Languages^[2]
• The first line contains, and may consist solely of, the subject's name."

If you wish to delve further into this poetic form, here is the link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerihew

The poet wishes to acknowledge Valley Micropress in whose pages some of these clerihews originally appeared.