Tuesday Poem – Page 5

Tuesday Poem: Return to Nussbaum Riegel

Posted on March 21, 2011

This is a tent.
This is another tent, next to the first tent.
This is a bag full of urine.
This is the vast inconceivable.

This is a rock.
This is another rock.
These are the deposits of a long-vanished glacier.
The frigid wind, whistling over the frigid ice, passing over long
generations of mummified seals making their stealthy way from the sea,
has formed these rocks into the unearthly shapes we call “ventifacts”,
photographs of which form the bulk of my presentation today.

This is me.
This is Guido.
This is Guido, Nails and Barry.
Guido, Nails and Barry
are men with whom I will always share a special
incommunicable
bond.

This is Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
He wrote his famous poem “Ulysses” while visiting Antarctica
on the first “Artists in Antarctica” programme
with Bill Manhire, Chris Orsman and Nigel Brown.
(This is Bill Manhire, Chris Orsman and Nigel Brown.)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson inscribed his famous poem “Ulysses” on a cross
placed on Observation Hill by the survivors of Scott’s Polar Expedition of 1910-1912.
To read it, you need a magnifying glass
and an iron constitution.

This is the Polar Party.
These are the Polar Party’s drinks and nibbles.
The Polar Party went on till 5 a.m.,
then made camp. Scott opened his diary,
wishing, not for the first time,
that he had brought a pen.

Credit note: “Return to Nussbaum Riegel” was first published in Issue 14 of Interlitq, A New Zealand Literary Showcase. This issue has stories and poems by a wide range of New Zealand writers – it is well worth checking out.

“Return to Nussbaum Riegel” will also appear in my forthcoming poetry collection Men Briefly Explained.

Tim says: Nussbaum Riegel is a rocky transverse ridge in the centre of the Taylor Valley, one of the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. The Dry Valleys have been among the main subjects of the New Zealand Antarctic research programme.

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: Landlines – my poem in response to the Christchurch earthquake

Posted on March 7, 2011

Landlines

It began with a tremor in the wires,
a voiceless howl of anguish.
Within minutes, the waiting world
has heard the worst — but there’s no news of you.
Amanda Palmer, an Olympic rower, former neighbours
are online. But you depend on landlines,
and the lines are down.

Were you at home when it struck? Were you
trapped on a fatal cross-town bus,
walking a hill track bombarded by boulders? Were you
unlucky under verandahs? I strategise
with relatives I barely know, plead on Twitter
for tiny clues, ask Google for your name.
I lift, and set down, and lift the phone.

At last we hear you’re safe at home,
barely touched, offering neighbours shelter.
My voice explodes with joy and messages.
I’m gabbling. I slow down. The bigger picture
presses in: so terrible, a city centre
crumbled into bone. I lift the phone.
It rings. You speak. I know, at last, I’m not alone.

Credit note: “Landlines” was first published as the Thursday Poem in the Dominion Post newspaper in Wellington on 3 March 2011.

Tim says: When the Dominion Post asked me to write a poem about the Christchurch earthquake of 22 February, I was on the verge of saying “no”, because I didn’t think that I could do justice to the subject. Then I decided to write a poem about my reaction in the aftermath of the earthquake, rather than the earthquake itself.

I was concerned about plenty of people in addition to my Dad and stepmother, including the Christchurch-based Tuesday poets, but including those concerns would have made for a rather unfocused poem.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

Tuesday Poem: choosing, by Owen Bullock

Posted on February 28, 2011

choosing

we didn’t realise
we chose the day
of the accident

what it woke up like
what you could see
from the window

what you read
in the newspaper

how the ticket collector
was towards you
before you spoke

Napoleon didn’t see the trench
when he rode out that morning
because he needed to be beaten

and when I was eight
and got run over
the lady visited me

gave me books, toys
remembered to call
for several months

Credit note: Choosing is from Owen Bullock’s new collection sometimes the sky isn’t big enough, published by Steele Roberts, and is reproduced with permission.

Tim says: This fine poem is a taster for my interview with Owen Bullock, which will run here on Thursday. Keep an eye out for it!

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

Tuesday Poem: Twoness Before Oneness, by Madeleine M. Slavick

Posted on February 21, 2011

TWONESS BEFORE ONENESS

He wears leather wings on his legs
called chaps. Boots, jeans, belt, hat.
Steps in the dirt corral
as if his first circle.
He has lived with horse
for fifty years, says the time
it takes is the time it takes.
As little, as much.
He leads, waits
feels, and the horse can feel
the smallest change
in body, thought, heart.
So be certain. Smooth,
soothe him after you mount him.
Love, love, and
direct with respect.
Worship one another.
There must be
twoness before oneness.
There is only one way of being,
and that is softness.

Credit note: Madeleine M. Slavick is a writer and photographer. Madeleine has several books of poetry and non-fiction and has exhibited her photography internationally. She has lived in Germany, Hong Kong, and the USA, and is currently based in New Zealand, where she maintains a daily blog: touchingwhatilove.blogspot.com. This poem is previously unpublished, and is reproduced by permission of the author.

Tim says: Madeleine tells me that she wrote this poem after meeting a master horse trainer recently, and observing a session when he was breaking in a horse. I like the flow of this poem, and I love the ending.

You can see all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

Tuesday Poem: Pukerua Bay, by Anne Harré

Posted on February 14, 2011

Pukerua Bay
for Jane

The city is a sheath of glass and low sun, clouds puff puffing
the blue sky, a lazy menace across the bay. I have the promise

of lunch (or at least a decent morning tea) waiting down
the liquorice motorway. In the car I breathe my way to the sea.

The light is deafening, Kapiti rolls itself, stretches itself on the horizon
and I follow your instructions along the beach, over the wooden

walkway, past baches, homes and views that defy the imagination,
to the single Norfolk Pine and long steps up to the house. See this,

you say pointing to the tangle of weeds, un-mown lawn, Jerusalem
clover planted under the cross, those dots are the blood that dripped

down, that’s what we were told, Catholics like a bit of drama, you say,
your skirt gently flap flapping. When I leave I take some away with me

but, unsure of what book to use, I press them in-between the pages
of the Shorter Oxford, under ‘h’ for heart.

Credit note: “Pukerua Bay” was first published in JAAM 27 (2009).

About Anne Harré

Anne Harré has a BA from the University of Canterbury in Music, American Literature, History & Politics. In 2001 she completed the diploma in Publishing and Editing from the Whitireia Polytechnic. She has also successfully completed several undergraduate papers from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Though slightly convoluted, her work history has included stints as a music teacher, a book seller, time with The New Zealand Book Council, Trustee of The Randell Cottage Writers Trust, and freelance editing.

Her poetry has been published in Jaam, The New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology, The NZ Listener, and non-fiction and reviews in The Christchurch Press and the DominionPost. As well as design and layout, she has been a past editor for the NZPS anthology. She lives and works in Wellington.

You can see all the Tuesday Poems at the Tuesday Poem blog.

Tuesday Poem: Aramoana Border Post

Posted on February 7, 2011

Aramoana Border Post

“Dunedin, that’s a fact!”
said the smelter proponents.
It wasn’t and would never be.

Our border post was a fact:
a jaunty little hut
perched on the dirty haunches of the road.

“Welcome to the Independent State of Aramoana!”
We had passports, visa stamps, the lot.
We stood outside in white coats and flagged down passing cars,

asked them their purpose, invited their support,
a dollar here or there to save the saltmarsh, the houses
the sandbar and the incandescent dunes.

We were an enterprising bunch. We had sent letters
to Zurich, Paris, Auckland
promising trouble should the corporations ever get this far.

They never did. Market failure or a failure of nerve
kept them away. There would be other darkness
but the place itself remains,

lonely, unpolluted:
Bear Rock, the dunes, the saltmarsh.
The low and sand-choked pathways of the sea.

Poem credit: This poem is from my first collection, Boat People (Copies still available for $5, folks – email me!)

Tim says: In my early twenties, I was involved in the Save Aramoana Campaign, which successfully opposed the building of an aluminium smelter at Aramoana, at the entrance to Otago Harbour – a proposal strongly supported by Rob Muldoon and his National Party government. The declaration of the “Independent State of Aramoana” was a highly effective piece of PR for the campaign, and a lot of fun too.

Thirty years on, I don’t hear too many people saying they wish there was an aluminium smelter at Aramoana. But another National Party government with a similar penchant for Think Big projects is encouraging New Zealand and overseas companies to dig up and process 6 billion tonnes of Southland lignite, which would lead to massive greenhouse gas emissions – big on not just a New Zealand, but a world scale. Through the Coal Action Network, I’m opposed to that plan too. Some bad ideas never really go away.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

Tuesday Poem: 1917

Posted on January 31, 2011

A hard day’s plotting gives a man a thirst.
For Lenin, it’s something dark and strong,
a Black Mac for his blackest moods.
Trotsky can’t decide: maybe an Export
maybe something brewed with ice.

“V. I. -“
“Wait on, Leon, just the dregs to go.” A pause,
the glug and swish of beer. “Aaah. That’s better.
You were saying?”

Trotsky looks up, face serious
above a thin moustache of foam. “V. I.,
why don’t we just take over?
The Tsar could never stop us. He’s
still chugging Lion Red from cans.”

It’s settled. Trotsky will inspire the workers.
Lenin will fuel the revolution
with crates of Lowenbrau
smuggled in from Zurich by sealed train.

Drink deep, Leon. Bottoms up, Vladimir Illyich.
Life will never look this simple or this clear again.

Tim says: This poem from my first collection, Boat People, seemed like either a good, or a completely inappropriate, choice after a week of revolt and revolution in Tunisia and Egypt.

Check out all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

Tuesday Poem: Riverine Elements, by Robin Fry

Posted on January 24, 2011

Riverine elements
(water, wind, earth, fire)

Led deeper inland
by the sinuous body of the river
civilisation followed the contours of this valley
named for a man no one remembers –

a river that gathers its waters from the depths
of the green land and from the sky.
In flood it swells over its stone floor
pushing great logs down to its delta
where storms return them
for children to ride like beached
whales along the sands of Petone.

The walls of hills are giant handrails
defining the valley, guarding its settlements
from the ferocious appetite of the ocean
earth’s rocks folded and faulted
through slow millenia
tamed and carpeted now to foothills
“where sheep may safely graze.”

Rail and roads followed the river
opened the folds of the hills
where houses perch like eagles’ nests
their windows gazing south to
an eternity of snow and water.

It is winter now
and Tararua’s icy breath
fogs the river flats
wreaths the goblin trees of Rivendell
the bush-clad terraces of Kaitoke.

Bare willows march their torches of flame
along the river banks
and soon, this clear, cold evening
the day will die around us in the colours of fire.

Credit note: This poem is from Robin Fry’s 2010 collection Time Traveller, published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop and available from the publisher.

Tim says: Time Traveller contains a number of Robin’s best-known poems, such as the superb Hurry, which won the open division of the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Poetry Competition in 2008, but when I read this collection I was especially drawn to this lovely poem about the Hutt Valley.

Tuesday Poem: The Balcony, by Iain Britton

Posted on January 17, 2011

Painted lines

criss-cross this universal playboy
of the Polynesian world.

A strange masochism is at work
threading hot wires through veins

connecting me to him
to this epiphany in progress.

He compartmentalizes the morning

inhabits a caption written for him

for a picture

of his maidservant her dog her cat.

He explores by touch
strips of sunlight draped over a balcony.

He’s neither soldier

sailor butcher

but carries a helmet for his journey.

From the balcony

blunted-blue agapanthus
choke in numbers.

Credit note: “The Balcony” is the opening poem in Iain Britton’s new collection Punctured Experimental, published by Kilmog Press and available from Parsons Bookshop in Auckland.

Tim says: I interviewed Iain Britton in 2009, shortly before his collection Liquefaction was published by IP. Iain subsequently got in touch to let me know about Punctured Experimental and to let me know that his work was moving in a more experimental direction – as reflected in the title of his new book, which continues the impressive publication schedule of Dunedin’s Kilmog Press.

Tuesday Poem Secret Santa

Posted on December 20, 2010

As things turned out, I didn’t wind up with a Secret Santa partner for the Tuesday Poem – but no matter! Check out all the pairs of poets and poems, plus the hub poem by James Brown chosen by Sarah Jane Barnett, on the Tuesday Poem blog.

It’s been great to be part of the Tuesday Poem this year – so, big thanks to Mary McCallum for organising it. I’ll be back into it next year, until I completely run out of poems…