Tuesday Poem - Blue Flash by Jennifer Compton

Blue Flash

The cloud must drift so the sun strikes the nail hole

in the corrugated iron so the horse dances sideways

on the thin shaft of light in the indoor arena – so I

am lifted across the bunkhouse kitchen by the flash

of blue loosed out of your eyes like laughter see me

dance sideways to switch on the kettle in a blue flash

the rider doesn’t shift in the saddle she has her weight

low holds the heartbeat between her legs so I seek for

the blue thrill of your glancing blow.

Tuesday Poem - Sound Check by Hinemoana Baker

Sound Check

you sound just like that woman, what's her name

she sings that one about the train

check one two one two check check

ka tangi te tītī tieke one two

she sings that one about the train

can I get another tui over here

ka tangi te tītī tieke one two

my secret love's no secret any more

can I get another tui over here

at last my heart's an open door

my secret love's no secret any more

that sounds choice love what a voice

at last my heart's an open door

you got a voice on you alright

that sounds choice love what a voice

you know the crowd's gunna soak up the highs

you got a voice on you alright

had a bit of a band myself back in the day

you know the crowd's gunna soak up the highs

i'd up the tops if I was you ay

had a bit of a band myself back in the day

check one two one two check check

i'd up the tops if I was you ay

you sound just like that woman, what's her name

I found this choice pantoum by NZ writer Hinemoana Baker in an anthology of Contemporary Polynesian Poems In English - Mauri Ola – edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan. It's published by Auckland University Press. Hinemoana lives in Kāpiti but she has a strong Australian connection because in 2009 she was the Arts Queensland Poet in Residence.

http://www.hinemoana.co.nz/

Tuesday Poem - The Panama Hat by Thom Sullivan

The Panama Hat

A man is waiting on the river-path:

an elderly man in shirtsleeves

and white cotton trousers –

with a cigarette that he smokes

down to the quick. He paces slowly

between the tumbledown brink

of the riverbank and a squat log

bested by a white panama hat.

He dabs his brow with the broad,

flat back of his hand. Uphill, along

a slope of summer olives, his wife

is picking flowers. Yellow flowers

and blue flowers. And further on

along the path, their grandchildren

are already stripping down to swim.

While I was in Adelaide I went along to the Friendly Street Reading and heard some fine poets. And one of them was Thom Sullivan. He’s a local, born there in 1982, and he studied Arts and Law there at the University of Adelaide and he works there in the public sector.  I found this poem in the Friendly Street New Poets 14.

Tuesday Poem - The Silence by C.K. Stead

                                                                     Karl in Genoa
                                                           


The Silence

The dead we know are gone except

when dreams return them. So it was

Frank Sargeson took me aside

in Hell and said, ‘You know, my friend,

how well the wind among the reeds

is used by shaman and guru,

rabbi and priest.’ He had the face

of Dante’s much-loved preceptor

Brunetto Latini among

the sodomites, as we ambled

down the avenues of the damned;

and he, brushing ash from his sleeve

went on, ‘Those with a patch of earth

and running water lack vision,

preferring to leave such mysteries

‘to desert-and mountain-dwellers

and the poor of Varanasi.

Where little is lacking listen

‘always to the silence until

you hear it whisper its name.’ So

he faded into fire, and I,

half-waking, wrote to remember

all that he’d said—and listened for

the silence, and could not hear it.

This poem by New Zealand writer C.K. Stead was short listed for the recent Montreal Prize.

Below is a link to a site which lists most – if not all – of his writing achievements, there are too many of them for me to go into. I bumped into Karl at the Genoa Poetry Festival a few years back and every so often we get in touch. I very much liked his poem – Into Extra Time – which was in Best NZ Poems 2007 and emailed him to tell him so. And he emailed me a note of congratulation when my book This City won the Kathleen Grattan Award. He lives in NZ but he does get around a bit. One could bump into him almost anywhere. http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/steadck.html

Tuesday Poem - The Thing Itself by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

The Thing Itself

The important thing is to build new sentences,

to give them a smart shape,

to get acquainted with grammar like a new friend.

One rubs down syntax

into coarse familiarity,

such foreplay as closes down all thought.

Were it not

that the undertaking is too mannered

(as gnostic as a shower of rabbits)

I would like to go right back,

devising a sentence

unlike any other creature in creation;

like nothing on the planet:

a structure full of brackets and cornices,

twigs, pediments, dadoes and halos and bells,

full of nuts, butter and flowers!

sinewy, nerved,

capable of blotches or of waving hair.

This would be a sentence to really show the buggers,

like a cute

new thing

or like a tree

recently invented

by some utterly brilliant committee;

it would glitter, articulate,

strum and diversify.

It would be the thing itself.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a poet and a professor (emeritus) and a tennis player and an amateur visual artist – and one of our elder statesmen. He reads his work so well, it is a delight to go to one of his readings. I try not to miss them. This subtle quirky poem is in his chapbook from Wagtail (Picaro Press) called The Thing Itself. (Published Feb 2007.)

http://www.picaropress.com/page5/page5.html