Helen Hagemann

Sunday, December 16, 2012

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.

Poem for the Day: In the Cypress Stillness ©

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.

Acknowledgement: Leaning Carriage House, 8 x 16, Oil on panel, L.
painting by artist Laurel Daniel

Poetic Graphic of the Day: Divorce Lawyer

Poem for the Day: A Fig Tree Joins the Singing

A Fig Tree Joins the Singing

Five years ago an Italian family

walked the park near the road where I live,

their big hands filling buckets with figs.

Then the park was suddenly bereft of the tree

and the family, as if the ritual was now only

a ghost of my morning walks.

I told myself they had flown back to their

home country. Later, I noticed the fig tree

hacked to a stump. Tractors were mowing the soccer

field in all directions. Every now and again, magpies

anchored their beaks into mown grass, a kookaburra

laughed, and galahs waddled their pink and grey silks,

crunching and moaning at the same time.

Two years ago, a limp wet rag. One year and the fig

tree is sprouting a sweet politeness, overshadowed

by a large gum. I thought they might be tree buddies,

as if the older eucalypt was playing God, protecting

young Adam's first cloth. The tree rising up

from earth, the hole at the base of the fruit

as an exit for sweetness to its puzzle inside.

The ostoile, as they call it, drips nectar for ants

and birds. When green skins purple, they signal

a store of jam for the old families who've seen fig trees

explode from the treads of tanks, or simply die

in the ground poisoned by war.

When figs ripen in the southern hemisphere

the last fruits are withering in the north.

Vandals posing as gardeners had put the tree down,

today it labours skyward, a phenomenal thing reaching

to meet green parrots dropping seed husks,

the fruit's tiger-stripes curving at the apex,

and the mud universe of wasps waiting

bat-like above the fingers of ovoid petals.

It only takes minutes for the queen to lay eggs

for a symbiotic hatching of pink florets.

Why did it receive so much attention?

So what if figs fell and decomposed?

So what if caved-in flesh became projectiles

under shoes? So what if neighbouring Italians

acquired God's free gift? The old women up

in the branches disappearing into their scarves.

Who was the ripeness for, anyway?

If this tree could speak do you think

it might say more than – massacre or theft?

There is a stillness at present in the park. Every once

in a while magpie larks let out a 'too-wit', and parrots

rebound in overtones. You know that the tree

is reaching out from beneath its host, waiting

for the old women to return with Italian songs,

and the men with their heads and shoulders

in the clouds, sluicing juice into gaping mouths.

Even the tree gives out its milky sap

strengthening its ancient ceremony

of renewal, lifting its course to the green fields,

the pink-and-grey maps of the parrots' wings.

And underneath that overshadowing eucalypt

with all that rattling going on above, is the fig tree –

of leaf, of man, of woman, rising up from the earth

to join all that singing.

I have always loved the word "Appaloosa"
after Judith Beveridge

I have never shown kilometres of the garden
to the Garden Gurus or Gardening Australia.
They have never caught my hues of Cineraries, Roses,

Magnolias, or Chrysanthemums that lie in yellow hoops.
They have never wandered through my garden with
a camera lens hung from tilted lights, that might
behold Hepatica, Melleluca, Limonium bush,

stroking it – as you would a Percheron horse.
I have never called my plants Tequilana,
Eremophila, or Leptospermum. Such scientific,

trifling names one can never remember them.
I have never used potash, alkaline magnesium,
dynamic lifter or bleach (that reddens the nose).
I only use nature's spurs and silks from the

horse manure in the compost heap. I have
never picked Dryandra from the neighbour's
fence or lifted Wexford apples bouncing on the

hedge. I have never sold my orchids at the village
fair, touchy-feely hands on their perfect growth,
but I do keep bees, those busy little maniacs
harvesting honeycomb. Yet none of this shows

thumb or green unless I share and show; a star-
burst of colour on the page. Ah, but more than
this, I have always loved the word "Forsythia."