December 2012 ~ Helen Hagemann

Friday, December 28, 2012

Poem for the Day: The Shadow of You

The Shadow of You

She has that look about her
the one you envy-
vogue shapes, fine lips,
curves of beauty, head cocked to one side
sashaying just ahead of you
between thin and schema.
Her caramel thighs dance and shine
and you can almost catch her light
as it falls on your oversized
stretched lycra bike knees
chasing the teasing shadow.
At the top of the hill
a thin, parked figure
waits for the larger you.

At night, the light of shadow
catches you leaning
in cool cake-shelves.
The only touch you feel
is the cream on your fingers
as you hold the layers of cherries wedged
between chocolate and rum liqueur.
Your mouth moistens to bite down
into what you know is warm, whipped ecstasy.
Your tongue salivates
on thick white dust-
tilts a morsel of crushed almonds
over effeminate lips.
Thoughts drip like chocolate syrup.

The plate is washed and stacked.
Hot water stirs a mist between frame
and moonlight.
A fluid fog chases the shadow of you
out into the dark night.
And the space between your left and right
looks to a distant past
through streets of thinness
when you did lose weight, could lose
had every reason to lose
the first time you loved.

Video: Som Sabadell Flashmob: Joyful, Joyful, we adore thee!

Published on 31 May 2012

On the 130th anniversary of the founding of Banco Sabadell we wanted to pay homage to our city by means of the campaign "Som Sabadell" (We are Sabadell) . This is the flashmob that we arranged as a final culmination with the participation of 100 people from the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l'Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs.

En el 130º aniversario de la creación de Banco Sabadell hemos querido rendir un homenaje a nuestra ciudad con la campaña "Som Sabadell". Esta es la flashmob que realizamos como colofón final con la participación de más de 100 personas de la Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès y los coros Lieder y Amics de l'Òpera y la Coral Belles Arts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBaHPND2QJg

Poem for the Day: The Only of Only Being Woman

The only of only being woman

I want to write the language of my sex
hear the crack of rope again
a childish squeak of crosses into desk
I want the oranges and apples of my chest
to be those grown-up watermelons
I want to feel the crack and split
the burrowing erotic trip between two thighs
I want the moment when a raspberry splits my teeth
the naked juice cascading open lips
I want the bulging sweet fecundity
of birth again
the unconditional taste of love that opened every pore
of earth
earth's sweet parlay of flowers
happy birth
that barefoot walk of motherhood.
I want to feel again those suckling lips
swimming sleepy in my milk
that gentle calm of dummy rocking on my hip
I want a new un-written law
of 'woman' at the washing board
where stooped she dyed the sheets with blue
and hung them on the travelling hoist
or dropped them water cold
to copper hot

I want to
talk about the nothingness of being
backyard bound
the claim that wife and house are one
take out the flack, the jokes, the puns
the only
of only being woman

Wishing all my Readers A Very Happy Christmas!

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM HELEN HAGEMANN

Thank you very much to all my readers of this blog. My poetry appears to be popular world-wide (I check the stats!). I do hope you have enjoyed following my journey as a poet, with many not-so-good efforts, some prize winners, and two simultaneous poetic themes happening, such as "The Irish Suite" and "Miniscule". Hopefully, in 2013 I will have many more poems for you to read from these two current manuscripts.

So to my readers in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom, Ireland, Brazil, Hong Kong, Serbia, Dominican Republic, Switzerland, Chile, Malaysia, Thailand, Netherlands, South Africa, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Italy, Ukraine, Portugal, India, Mozambique, Indonesia, Russia, Belgium, (Macedonia [FYROM], Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Finland, Spain< I'm visiting you, next year! Philippines, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Armenia, Mexico, France (merci beaucoup) - I keep adding more!> THANK YOU!

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas, and whether you're in the sun or snow, may your god go with you to keep you safe, cool or warm. May you have peace and joy, may the smiles of children be like mirrors in your eyes. Please stay safe, and do not drink & drive get a bus, a cab or a skipper to ferry you through the door.

I want you back - to read more!

Best wishes, Helen
xxxx

Poem for the Day: Old Churches: Published in Eureka St.

Old Churches

Like scaly frill-necked lizards sitting on a rock, old churches assemble themselves in bush retreats. Weathered and sacrificial, things have flown off: pigeons in the belfry, the roof of the outhouse. They tug at the years like a bell-rope, even the spiders have run out of larvae and moth. The stained windows have stories with lead beading, blues and greens, the colour of eyes that once dipped in prayer. The front door bolts open on wooden pews that line the walls. Ceilings creep upward in silent communion. Porcelain hands like the soft robes of Jesus reach across a domed fresco from Bethlehem to Nazareth. You discern the old settlers were here by their marble tablets, paintings by the Dutch school. The winds have passed through these buildings, coursing leaves and the aroma of earth. In daylight a wagtail or wren will veer suddenly overhead from an open window, tap at water rusted in its turn. When darkness settles on rocks and stones, old churches shrug back into themselves, back into their timber rafters that squeak a thousand Amens. Only horses on the hillside, listening to the charms of trees, will trickle past in ones and twos, find greener pastures under the shade of a plane tree; where once restless girls studied Psalms and the Book of Matthew, and grew up to ride horses, saddled on the hillside.

Absolutely thrilled to receive news just before Christmas. This poem is now published in Eureka Street Journal, Vol 22 #24 . Check out the journal and other poems @ http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=34650

Poem for the Day: Perfumed with Black Intentions

Perfumed with Black Intentions

the oil of a piano bar

leather jackets of idleness

voices in a poker card

cigars that look too high

as she smoothes her lipstick dress

and tapered leg

where nights are black stockings

dressed in a body of intentions

daring enough to wave goodbye

to a white suspender

a wrecking pink thigh

sensuous girl in a hurry of g-string

grinning like a roll of wire

customers waiting for the nipple of night

lace at the edge of the stage

a bald man, losing his front row seat

reaches for the holier grail

like a memory of her scented life

his mark of affection

her last season

Poem for the Day: unconscious -v- consciousness

unconscious -v- consciousness

speech is shrinking
individuals are quiet
they know their place
inside a bottle
zonked against a wall of 21 year-olds
entering heaven at 90 degrees
powered by technology
high speed, ecstasy, super highway, nerd brigade
folding dollars at the ATM
bank clerks desperate for a pee
clinging to our processes
advancing to the end of our lives
we're pushed along by corporatism
lack of time, free time, no time
victims of disquiet
the submissive condition
disequilibrium
at the marketplace of
self-loathing

I speak from a woman's point of view
tonight I languish in memory
reason, imagination
I'm worshipping words
looking for legitimacy, intimacy with you, dear reader
I'll show you my breasts as they rise and fall
between each Adam's rib
I'll spray your nightmare with my passion
rough and tumble you with crude self-interest
biologically implied
and all the while, stagnating in new worlds
of global Luddites, roof lines, tilt slab walls
I look back through passageways of crushed flowers
love sonnets and angry men
guide a tear over diminished rock and riverbed
ask in ten years what I did for you
in the field of this poem
did I move you beyond the centre of left and right
did I talk to you, dear reader, like death
a human solider severed at the head
or did I give you a hint of passion
a langue of female voice
blonde hair
blue eyes
do you know outside this poem
I look good in red

Poem for the Day: Liberty

Liberty

I want to climb inside your love machine
There we would make mystic love
Let's ride the sky where the air is thin.

I'll bring the chocolate, strawberries and cream
Flowered pillow from the big brass bed
I want to climb inside your love machine.

I want to climb inside your love machine
Open portal door to where it's warm
Let's ride the sky where the air is thin.

Now that spring is nature's limousine
And birds and bees are the steering wheel
I want to climb inside your love machine.

We've spent the years in bitter mien
Shed our tears in a village scene
I want to climb inside your love machine
Let's ride the sky where the air is thin.

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Feminist Graphic for the Day

Another Found Poem: Recalling All that's Dear in my Motherland

Recalling All that's Dear in my Motherland

I've read Dorothea Mackellar's poem, My Country
and sometimes treasure words like "motherland".

This land is mine, and like the poet, too, love her
jewel-sea, the ochre beauty of the Kimberleys,

hot paprika sun on a rear view mirror facing south.
Mackellars's version remains the same, of droughts,

of floods, and driving rains, but I'm bound to all that's
personal. The freedom of the road, travelling north,

back seat to a parents' final town. I'm not in exile like
Tsvetaeva or Akhmatova. I move without restraint,

photographing forests, the Puffing Billy at Cockatoo,
Gembrook pines, the Great Australian Bight, rabbits

skittering against the light. Majestic Australia: rough,
raw land that determines if you die. To survive: do not

travel without water, food, extra cash, fuel, compass,
flashlight. Use a modern car, not too old, or clapped

out. Remember dampen every fire, carry flares if lost,
or the moon will be a lonely sixpence in the night.

Ode to the Passing of Australia

Goodbye Australia, land of twelve sunshines,
diggers who fought in two world wars.
Goodbye to village shops and green that squatted
at the butcher's verge, the baker's, news-agencies.

Say goodbye to your youth's milkbar, beach sand
on the floor, flipped by rubber thongs. Farewell
old Australia, taking down the picket fence
for lung disease, smokers puffing in the breeze.

Yes! say hello to the GFC, a global empire
of poor economics, minus the rich.
We're all in the pot together, looking
down at who might drown, go down

with Greece, when some of us here
in Oz are being fleeced, by banks,
by corporations, watch the bull market,
watch your dividends daily dwindle.

Invest, invest, dollars and shares, tele-pads,
kindles, communications, it's all the same,
K-Mart, A-Mart, every town the same,
Target, Coles, Myer, Harvey Norman.

He's moving town, exchanging dollars
for a changing a world of tourists' frowns,
discover his low down moaning, his wealth,
his large store in Dublin-Cork-Ireland.

In the Cypress Stillness

Old weatherboard houses
have the mouse hard at work

in a kind of indoor cemetery.
The interior blows the blue pollen

of asbestos. A curious Schnüffler,
the mouse chisels into electric wires.

Some old houses lean on their sides
like old shoe boxes broken or blown

on their journey from hill to hill. Those
high on the tips of ranges twitch like

fetlocks at their base, trees collapsed
into a pile of one hundred years. The

axe cleaved into a split star of wood.
Half way up the slopes, horses are

grazing in the cypress stillness.
They lean on each others' rumps

like old houses that sleep that way
with the taste of orchard and rust.

Under cloud the paddock has a
universe in it. Trees built by stars.