Sunday, October 21, 2012

Poem for the Day: Broken Sandals

broken sandals

you drive to work, hear the falling of war
horror, horror at arm's length
heart too irascible, too helpless
to assuage this bludgeoning
of New York streets
all you can do is sharpen the instrument
appease this senseless act
in the life of a poem
forgive, forgive these humble words, dear reader
that think only of a crying field
dresses/suits drenched in goodbye
arms crossed under cotton stars

you pen alpha and omega catches up
moments in someone else's war
an assignment on personality
brought you the Colonel - Perth surgeon
with a long term memory, his book
To war without a gun
he knew war, he said, like a doctor
sewing back — a man's face
transient medico dodging sniper attacks
shifting camel-humps of sand
arguing, at thin attention, behind wired huts
for rice to sate men's bellies

in this woman's body
I've known anger, mostly fury
children slamming wire doors brought melodrama
skirts protected their crushed knees
of bewilderment
you offered anything in bed
for happiness—
while yours arms lifted and imagined
unzipping the sky

a sparrow falls
is a poem, is a hint of death
but nature has no memory or fault
half a bed is all you remember
of thirty three years
you could loose yourself to a woman
an inn and a donkey
follow the magi, some endearing star
but your heart wouldn't be in it
you'd only skirt the tracks in sandals
bought from a second-hand store

heaven never wanted it this bad
laugh lines swollen in disguise
polite sisters chewing veils of endurance
like those burqa women
too beautiful for words, hovering sand
in bazaar and stall
like mythical eagles in dark sunglasses

could there be some universal misery
between lonely girls who want to soar above the date palm?
(future poets perhaps, ready for voice and shelf)
it's all the same, east or west
imperialism traps us
orientalism traps others and the rest
designed by cranky patriarchs in 'control' laboratories
'suppression/subjugation'
of voice
of skin
of mind
of personality
of THE imagination
some damaged at the neck
zippered at the roots
slits for eyes
we'll all pass on their seed
down the line
like blisters in radio silence

The Wardrobe

Positioned under a solar roof, it is framed
in lightweight timber, lacquered by workers
in Guangdong, and sent on a lurching ride across
oceans. Slats dip with a lick of dust,
open to the body’s temple of skirts, suits,
coats and frocks – outfits that grew and grew –
the ark of clothes kept for years, as if they might
emerge by some trick of light,
slip from their crocheted hangers, fit the new
svelte you since the cabbage soup, Atkins or
Master Cleanse – a surfeit of diets meant to fail
like marriage, though now you’re a single world of one
where a far-off silence is that little black dress
on a bus ride to town, two nights
proceeding the break-up.

In the mustiness of white walls, two crates
of books: Tootle, Bambi, Where the Wild Things Are.

Some with battered spines, corners bent more often in the excited

plunge into pillows and sheets. The introspection of days

with your children immersed in Snakes & Ladders, Monopoly, Twister.
There’s a shrill of parties squarely on the floor, boxed cards,
Christmas decorations, papery thin, made after school.

On the top shelf, an orchestra of memory: an acoustic guitar,

two harmonicas wheezed through with spit, a ukulele

where the moths fly in. Photographs are pooled here

with no sound, for the players are gone, and only treasures are left.

You wince, pushing back the clothes, the resistance being in the

way you cradle two Vinnies’ bags. Defiance and pleasure join

in closing two louvre-doors, one on the larger you,

the other – on that little black dress.

Poem for the Day: Walking with the Bee Poem (from Miniscule) ©

Walking with the Bee Poem

After my aimless strolling that led me
to meditate on the ancient running of birds,
and the way pink/grey galahs, magpies

and peewees were bound together like
the scrolls of clouds, I began to power walk
concentrating on an increase of speed.

As it happened a poem was walking with me.
It started a week before with the line
the comings and goings of bees,

and so I continued circling the park
thinking of the next line while listening
to Pomegranates by Anthony Lawrence.

I had seen bees clinging to a copper's log
and discovered later that this buzzing temple
of wings, shaped like a beating heart,

was commonly known as 'swarming'. During
several mornings, the cluster moved from one log
to another, then to an olive branch, where it

precariously hung like a brown thought-balloon.
The bees moved again, and this is where the poem
struck me as a magic engine of nature; the olives

beginning to nugget, magpies chortling into mown
grass, peewees translating behind, and the bees
shouldering their way into a body of wings.

In the end, I wanted the poem to buzz and sing,
hoping words might rise up like the noble bee
and sting the morning with all its earthly noise.

A Prize Winner! Returning (Rottnest Island poems)

This poem just won the inaugural Adrien Abbott Poetry Award 2012!

https://www.facebook.com/AdrienAbbottPrize

Returning

The ferry makes the journey

to an island, late afternoon.

It leaves the harbour, scrolls water

forward and back into yellow-dots of light. The way

a woman curls the hem of a beautiful gown.

Love returns with its dangers. This is what

happens when you lay a new image over the old.

Ten years, and you thought the gods looked down

on your heart. The strength of it. How could they

know? You fell in love. Grew into fragments

of stories: midnight parties, Céline Dion,

Springsteen, two or three beers, your legs singing;

a womb waiting, with water in it.

Heart slain, you felt gutted as a shark

is killed for the luxury of its roaming.

The wind pulls at your silence where love used to be.

Do Sea Bass run here? Are the whales in shallows

this moment, struggling to get home?

These are questions that arise, until dockside comes.

A pelican, manoeuvring flight, hangs out her wings

on your promenade walk, shades your return

as you pass by the gate.

Review of A Man Melting by Craig Cliff

A Man Melting is Craig Cliff’s debut collection of eighteen short stories, and with much acclaim has won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize for First Best Book. In the frontispiece of the book, Cliff appears as a high achiever and a globetrotter. Born in Palmerston North, New Zealand, he has accumulated three university degrees, lived in Brisbane & Melbourne, experienced office life in Scotland, swum in piranha-infested waters, slept at 4,200 metres above sea level, tried to write a million words in one year, and learnt there’s not much to do in Liechtenstein.

A Man Melting, the title story, is about a man shrinking to his skeletal form after his total body percentage of water melts away. According to the scientist (a man he seeks help from), ‘the body is ninety per cent water at birth, decreasing when an adult to seventy per cent water. The elderly are about fifty per cent.’ Unlike the horror film The Incredible Melting Man (Sachs 1977), who after radiation melts away in a grotesque ooze of blood, skin and liquid, Cliff’s “man melting” is more like a slow, pristine trickle of water. He has to constantly drink from his water bottle with a straw to stay alive. As well, he has to carry a paddling pool around to catch the effluent. There are many points in the narrative when you recognize the author’s black humour, yet there is a serious undertone - a character’s identity crisis; in his other stories the exempla of the underdog or weirdo kid who gets picked on. Evolution or more poignantly “the struggle for existence” (Facing Galapagos, eg getting Darwin’s emails) are unique and interesting main themes. While many stories are a mixed genre of science fiction/ fantasy /surrealism, in others the author satirizes real life scenarios, especially a failed suicide. In Manawatu a young man jumps off a building to catch the attention of his brother, only to find that from one level up, he lands safely on his auntie’s lawn, no bones broken; glad he can still feel his blood pumping.

Other highlights of this collection include Copies, about a young man recalling his late father’s obsession with photocopying images until they shrink beyond recognition. Fat Camp's minor character Barry is endearing, but would have like more of him. Another Language and The Sceptic's Kid are by far the best stories in the collection. A theme of sadness and non-communication show the effects of migration from tyranny. Themes of hidden pedophilia are subliminal in The Sceptic’s Kid when a boy doesn’t like his adopted uncle touching him, and where the same boy researches his mother’s ideology as a "TV sceptic". Juxtaposed with what is believable vis-à-vis what may be unbelievable, the children witness an extinct Moa; a flightless bird that the mother argues does not exist.

Some of the weaker stories are possibly Cliff’s pet projects on childhood and school days; an imaginary friend named Groucho in Seeds, and the idiots and school gangs in The Tin Man , but this is only a minor criticism. A Man Melting is well worth a look from a new author.

Helen Hagemann (c) 2012

Poem for the Day: Country Gate Swings Back on a Country Girl

Country Girl Swings Back on a Country Gate

Imagine a radio playing, the Voice of America,

and a slivered moon above a country cottage

in green and cream weatherboard.

A country girl swings back on a country gate,

the pulse of the landscape creaking with her,

sound of metal like strangled heat in December.

Parents tap her on the shoulder,

send her off to church. Funny way of bringing

God into your life when she prefers the beach.

The sky’s too bright to strap her in.

The shed school bullies down the beach,

drowning their faces in a flap of coats.

In the midst of family chores, the stars are crazy

in a storm. She remembers the circling

huntsman spinning music on the gramophone.

In the fork of a wooden gate, she hollers at the boys

dragging timber up the lane. A tree-house allows the blue

of clouds, tinted leaves and only birdsong in.

Childhood days - father stacking bottles near the shed,

mother feeling every cotton drop from the Singer
like egg shells breaking when he passed.

There’s only one woman she loves supreme. Gran

in floured hands, clipping hedgerows in the heat.

Sundays, teaching her to knit and sew into silence.

She left scrapbooks filled with cake, tobacco days of rum

and horse-drawn carts. She left tins of buttons and pearls,

the house and land, the memories she traversed on.

Ladybird

At the courtyard cafe,
after we had sat down to lunch
and were deeply engrossed
in the board menus,
those exotic meals
that no one understands the name of

a wagtail flipped around
at our feet.
listening to the origins
of Golding's Lord of the Flies.

At the same time, as we finished
our Chorizo, Red Shakshuka, and
several glasses of Shiraz,
a ladybird hopped
onto the neck of a coffee cup.
She proceeded to fly
from one zone to another
her wings engaged, throttle ready, as if
she was Nancy Bird-Walton
on a transpacific crossing
that reeked of occasion.

It was a windy day
and after some hesitation
circling a wavering line
of acrid smoke,
it was better
to shrink that wide world
into a lady's handbag
where she looked long and hard
into its interior, possibly
for breadcrumbs
or anything else for that matter
of interest.