Tuesday Poem – Page 3

Tuesday Poem: Impertinent To Sailors – Now Set To Music

Posted on September 12, 2011

Curved over islands, the world
dragged me south in a talkative year

slipping Southampton
as the band played a distant farewell.

It was better than steerage,
that assisted passage: ten pound Poms

at sixpence the dozen, promenading
in sun frocks, gathering for quoits,

angling, in an understated way,
for a seat at the Captain’s table —

while I, a child, roamed decks, became
impertinent to sailors.

And the heat! My dear, there never were
such days — rum, romance,

the rudiments of ska. Panama beckoned,
locks pulsing like the birth canal.

We passed through, to be rocked
on the swells of the quiet ocean,

its long unshaded days
of trade winds, doldrums, Equator —

then a cold shore,
a bureaucratic harbour,

and the half of a world
it would take to say goodbye.

Credit note: “Impertinent To Sailors” was published in JAAM 27 (2009), edited by Ingrid Horrocks, under the title “Over Islands”, and is included in my new collection Men Briefly Explained.

Tim says: I’ve run “Impertinent to Sailors” as my Tuesday Poem before, and I don’t usually repeat them – but there is a special reason to do this week. “Impertinent To Sailors” has been set to music as a choral work, “Brighton to Bondi”, which will premiere at a concert of the same name at the Sydney Town Hall on Friday 16 September.

Here is composer and conductor Brett Weymark’s account of how he wrote “Brighton to Bondi”.

I was delighted when Brett got in touch, having found my poem online when it was previously posted as a Tuesday Poem – so thanks go to Mary McCallum too, for getting the Tuesday Poems rolling in the first place!

I hope the concert is a great success, and I also hope that this will not be the last time “Bright to Bondi” is performed.

You can check out all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem Blog – this week’s hub poem in the centre of the page, and all the other Tuesday Poems on the right.

Tuesday Poem: The Wall, by Tony Malone

Posted on September 5, 2011

The sole guardian of the citadel is he,
the last hope of a billion souls and a billion hearts,
a warrior towering in front of his own Thermopylae –
through him, they must pass.

He stands, waiting, as so many times before,
with the calm of the warrior,
for the approach of the foe…

which comes again
with a fiery catapult
of blazing red
thundering down the pass
finally breaking his resolve,
shattering his defence,
ending his resistance.

The white-clad warriors cheer,
their victory dance mocking the memory
of the heroic struggle. The people roar
as the warrior disappears from view, yet…

In their joy is respect, and the truth that
with the falling of the Wall,
victory is inevitable – and complete.

Credit note: “The Wall” is published here for the first time by permission of Tony Malone.

Tim says: A couple of weeks ago, my Tuesday Poem was Ponting’s Genius by Meliors Simms. Meliors’ poem was about Herbert Ponting, the photographer who accompanied Scott’s expedition to Antarctica, but as I expected, some of my readers saw the title and though that Meliors’ subject was Ricky Ponting, Australian cricket captain.

One such was Tony Malone, an Australian writer, reader, reviewer and blogger who, like me, is a participant in the weekly South Pacific and Asia Book Chat (#spbkchat) on Twitter. I told him he was welcome to send me a poem about Ricky Ponting (and he still is!), but instead he sent me one about a cricketer I greatly admire, Rahul Dravid.

England and India have just finished playing a Test cricket series during which England overtook India as the #1 team in the world. In fact, England beat India 4 tests to 0. India were hugely disappointing, and only one of the great Indian batsmen stood up against the English bowling attack: Rahul Dravid, the man they call The Wall. Tony’s poem is a fitting testament to his skill and determination.

If you’d like to read some more cricket poems, check out New Zealand cricket poetry anthology A Tingling Catch, edited by Mark Pirie, and the blog he maintains that has carried on the work of the anthology.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Tuesday Poem: Tres Hermanos

Posted on August 29, 2011

They’re feudin’, Mama.
They’re rasslin’.

They’re camped up in Bozeman
for the party season.

One is a long bore.
Another raids the mini-bar, now sure

his date won’t show. The third
defends his diary with a secret code.

A horseman riding by
observes the niceties of outstretched thumbs

(that poor horse,
sway-backed and spavined,

when all it wanted was a better ranch).
Hear that far-off harmonica blow

beneath that far-off sky.
See that second mortgage slip away.

They’re fussin’ and a–fightin’, Mama,
those three sons of yours,

arguing over the script
as wolves tiptoe behind.

Credit note: “Tres Hermanos” appears in my new poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained.

Tim says: The note about this poem at the back of Men Briefly Explained helpfully advises as follows:

“Bozeman is the fifth largest city in Montana, on the route of the former Bozeman Trail. Though this is not stated in the poem, the three titular brothers are named Zack, Jed and Joss, which irresistibly suggested a Western theme.”

Times are tough, even in Hollywood.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Tuesday Poem: Ponting’s Genius, by Meliors Simms

Posted on August 22, 2011

Ponting’s genius was in his cruel portraits
of heroes on their improbable returns.
Emaciated bodies invisible inside the ice armour
of clothes unchanged for many months.
Hollow eyes, blank, bleak, utterly spent;
dirty desperate faces that have looked straight at death
and now gaze without flinching upon the camera.
What is this few more minutes of relief denied, delayed,
after endless weeks of scurvied sledging on frostbitten feet.

Never has a photographer been less loved by his subjects
than Ponting, pointing his slow Edwardian shutter
at men on the verge of respite,
men looking over his shoulder towards warmth and safety,
already smelling the cocoa and toast of their fantasies.
Men still to be cut out of frozen solid garments
whose health will never fully recover from the ordeal
they have only just survived.
The death in those heroes’ stares
is murderous.

Credit note: “Ponting’s Genius” won the Wintec open poetry prize in 2010, and is reproduced as a Tuesday Poem by permission of Wintec.

Tim says: Meliors is someone I admire a great deal – not just for such fine poems as these, but for the hard work she puts into her art, for the fantastic results she produces, and for her dedication to her artistic career. She is also a really neat person.

You can find out a lot more about Meliors, her art, and her fascination with Antarctica in my interview with her, which I’m aiming to run on Thursday – as long as I get all the great images she’s sent to accompany the interview sorted out in time!

And just in case any stray cricket fans are wondering … the “Ponting” of this poem is not Ricky Ponting, that gimlet-eyed little Aussie battler from Launceston, but Herbert George Ponting, the photographer who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica in 1910-11 – and, as far as I know, no relation of the more recent Ricky.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Tuesday Poem: Giant, by Janis Freegard

Posted on August 15, 2011

I got chatting to a Powelliphanta snail at the bus-stop
a few weeks ago – a nicer worm-eating hermaphrodite
you couldn’t hope to meet. Sorry to hear about that
mine, I said. Relocation of your entire species to a
government fridge and all that. State-approved
destruction of the damp tussock home that’s been yours
since Maui fished up the North Island.

And isn’t it terrible about the coral reefs disappearing
because we’ve made the sea too acidic? And the tuna
being overfished and the polar bears running out of ice
floes. I’m ever so sorry about it, and you too, you poor
thing, all that time in the fridge. I kept meaning to write
someone a letter about that. Couldn’t somebody do
something?

S/he shrugged and said
(with a sigh
waving tentacled eyes
from a glabrous shell):
they tried, you know, they tried
at least some people tried
at the very very least
you have to try.

Credit note: “Giant” is republished by permission of the author and of Auckland University Press from Janis Freegard’s first solo collection, Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus.

Tim says: I finished reading Janis’s striking collection Kingdom Animalia on my way back from a meeting about Solid Energy’s plans to mine up to six billion tonnes of lignite (low-grade brown coal) in Southland – plans which would not only despoil the Southland landscape, but lead to a massive increase in New Zealand’s carbon dioxide emissions. That’s the same Solid Energy that, in its rapacious greed, relocated Janis’s Powelliphanta and his/her kind to get at the coal beneath.

So I agree that, at the very least, you have to try. But I think, if we and our descendants are going to be around to enjoy poems like Janis’s in 50 to 100 years’ time, we might have to go one better. We might have to succeed.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

UPDATE: Having read Janis’s poem, Australian writer PS Cottier got in touch to let me know about her story Trail of Disinformation, which advances a novel solution to a similar problem!

Tuesday Poem: Fatigues, by Barbara Strang

Posted on July 25, 2011

Often in Dunedin I notice
a tall young man
who looks like you

huddling with his girlfriend
on the damp main street.
He wears a knitted beret

in shades of faded moss
and tangerine
like ancient tartan,

his eyes gleam
in a sallow face
like the lying harbour,

his skin beneath
the wispy beard
glints like Flagstaff granite.

I can’t believe you’re
not the one haunting these streets
with a new friend

your shoulders hunched
in a greatcoat suitable
for soldiering on mountains.

Credit note: “Fatigues” was first published in JAAM 26 and is included in Barbara Strang’s new collection, The Corrosion Zone (HeadworX, 2011).

Tim says: “Fatigues” is one of my favourite poems in Barbara’s new collection, and it strikes me as a particularly Dunedin sort of poem, which is always a good thing. Watch out for my interview with Barbara, which will run on my blog in a couple of days.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Tuesday Poem: This is the way the world ends, by Helen Rickerby

Posted on July 11, 2011

This story is about remembering
and forgetting

Not knowing where you are
or if it’s real

But you can die with a martini in your hand

The girl in pink, skating towards you
has an automatic weapon
behind her back

and this drug will take you to Jesus
if Jesus is a chorus
line of short-skirt nurses

There is too much sun in California
for shadows

There are other people
in this story

The bride and groom who laughed themselves to death

the boy who lost hope

the pirate soldier, the man with two souls

the porn stars, the family

the whole city

the whole world

This is an apocalypse

in an ice cream truck

Twiddling his fingers
While LA burns

‘He’s going to die,’ says one blonde, sadly
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ says the other

as they dance cheek to cheek
hand in manicured hand

There’s nothing they can do

Credit note:“This is the way the world ends” was first published in Trout 16 and is reproduced here by permission of the author.

Tim says: Helen Rickerby and I have something more in common than being Wellington members of the Tuesday Poets. We like something that, to many, is a subject to be scorned, feared, or ridiculed. We like Richard Kelly’s movie Southland Tales.

Southland Tales, Kelly’s followup to Donnie Darko, was a critical and commercial disaster, a great, sprawling, baffling, infuriating mess of a movie that goes nowhere and everywhere at once. The thing is, though, that it is full of the most wonderful images and concepts. It’s like someone put Andrei Tarkovsky’s soul inside Michael Bay and gave TarkoBay (Baykovsky?) a few mill to go and play with. It’s the postmodern “Heart of Darkness”. It’s nuts. You should see it.

But that’s enough about me … from this raw material, Helen has fashioned another of her marvellous poems inspired by movies.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Tuesday Poem: A Life Blighted By Pythons, by Janis Freegard

Posted on July 4, 2011

waiting at the bus-stop
all I can think about
is how my hovercraft is full of eels

but it’s not, of course it’s not
my hovercraft is practically empty
my eels are few

in fact they’re not eels at all
but a netload of whitebait
and it isn’t even a hovercraft

I’ve never owned a hovercraft in my life
I wouldn’t know what to do with one
it’s not even a dinghy

it’s a reusable eco-friendly shopping bag
and they’re definitely not eels
and not even whitebait

the truth is, I’ve never been whitebaiting
they’re just vegetables
and I only have one thing to say:

your eels
my hovercraft
now, baby, now

Credit note: “A Life Blighted By Pythons” is republished by permission of the author and of Auckland University Press from Janis Freegard’s first solo collection, Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus.

Tim says: I am reading Janis’s marvellously entertaining collection at the moment, and I love this poem so much not only because of its intrinsic qualities, but also because of the shared cultural heritage it so vividly evokes. You can catch more of Janis’s wit and wisdom in my interview with her, which I’ll be posting later this week.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Tuesday Poem: Janet Frame’s Adversaries Have Their Way. Janet is Lobotomised and Spends Her Life Selling Hats in Oamaru., by Laura Solomon

Posted on June 20, 2011

What good would she have been anyway,
left the way she was, full of dotty ideas, half-crippled by madness?
There’re enough raving lunatics in the world,
we don’t need one more curly-haired crazy,
lolloping about the streets, spilling prophecy.

What good would she have been anyway,
claiming to be from her Kingdom by the Sea,
perching on gravestones in the Otago Cemetery,
staring into the far distance,
like somebody who could see something we couldn’t?

And see her there, so happy, all her pain chopped out, eradicated,
along with all her brilliance. Smiling, always smiling – so what if the eyes look dead?

It’s not visionaries the world needs, but hat sellers.

She was something that could not blend in,
too many sharp angles, too many gaudy colours,
and gawd that hair,
but anything, you’ll find, can be reduced to black and white,
anything can be shoved into a box,
it’s just a question of how much has to be chopped off
in order to get it to fit.

After all, anybody can write a book. It’s retail work that’s tricky,
all those numbers to add up and subtract,
when you tally up at the end of the day (that’s if they choose to grant you such power),
all those hats to keep in those tidy little piles,
same colours, same shapes, all together, all neat,
a place for everything. Everything in its place.

All those people to so faithfully serve.

Don’t ask me who made the mould – somebody else, a long, long time ago.
Who cares now, when that thing was created, or how?
we all managed to squeeze ourselves into it,
so why shouldn’t she be forced to do the same?

Who cares what she could’ve or would’ve achieved,
left to her own devices?

The important thing is that we maimed her while we had the chance,
before she grew too big for the boots we wanted her in.

O please now, children, don’t make a fuss,
She could’ve been one of the greats, they said,
now she’s one of us.

Note: This poem is published in Laura Solomon’s collection in vitro (HeadworX, 2011). Look out for my interview with Laura later this week.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Tuesday Poem: 256 Words For Snow, by Mary Cresswell

Posted on June 13, 2011

I’m inclined to tow the line, you opined, dismantling
the spyglass and putting it into the icebox we
kept for that season.

I stormed out.

This was not what I had in mind as, armed only with
            a memory stick, I considered possible forays
            into the outside world. The blizzard clattered
            frozen water and blazed around the windows.

Exercising demons is not one of my skills, but I
            excepted this. Perhaps the hexagonal flakes
            will cease their incessant fall upon the
            coruscating rink.

Perhaps none of this is true.

I put my ear to the wall of the cabin and ascertained
            that what I heard was sound. The shape is
            troped in the shaven ice, you cried, and we
            will all be quashed.

Nonsense, I snapped, cutting your fine Italian
            hand off at the wrist and tossing it across
            the estuary. We must swing through the
            slush fund, take what we can, and proceed
            according to precedent. There is no other way.

The ship rocked, as if in answer.

You began to nibble my ear lobe, and I leaped
            back. Outside outside, I cried and cried. You
            collected the tears as they rattled down like
            crystal beads into the bilges. We dragged up a
            try-pot and commenced fire.

A full moon shone as the storm moved north-
            northwest, seeking a kinder sunset. As we
            sank our starveling selves into the pleasures of
            the boil, I elucidated the stars: The Dog and
            the Bear. The Dipper. The Dongle, the Bilge
            Pump.

We dined on fried snow and were glad.

Credit note: “256 Words For Snow” is published in Mary Cresswell’s new collection Trace Fossils.

Tim says: After I interviewed Mary about her new book recently, I’ve had the pleasure of reading it – in fact, I just finished it tonight, and I enjoyed it very much. There are a lot of tremendous poems in there, but this one really popped out for me. Of all the many things I like about it, the thing I like about it most is that it mentions memory sticks and dongles – but then, I’m known to be easily amused.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog – the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week’s other poems are linked from the right-hand column.