Tuesday Poem - Strangers by Laurice Gilbert

Strangers

Inge said

I have no family

Aah! we said,

how wonderful

No, she said

think about it

If I never send another Christmas card

no-one will complain

and I have no obligation ever

to write another letter

Sounds delicious we said

how can we achieve this?

No, think about it she said

I travel the world alone

Yes? we said

so far so good

And no-one to inform if my plane should crash

or I should get lost at sea

or I should have a heart attack

in a cheap hotel of my own choosing

Sounds liberating we said

how free you are

No, she said

I noticed this acerbic, and charming, poem when it was published in Bravado after being awarded

second prize in their competition. It's like a paper cut, you feel a little sting and then suddenly you

are gushing blood. It's a little bit of perfect. I love the judicious use of punctuation, especially the

final lack of it. It makes the poem zoom out.

Laurice Gilbert lives in Wellington and is the President of the NZ Poetry Society.

Tuesday Poem - Apologising to Unicorns by Peter Boyle

                          Apologising to Unicorns

Apologising to unicorns is problematic. They rarely understand our purposes. Tenderness will often be seen as the manipulative gestures of a fear that seeks death – for itself and others. Unicorns sleep most comfortably in heavy traffic where the hum of self-absorbed commuters leaves them invisible. To find a unicorn in a forest is like falling asleep in English and waking up fluent in Pashtun. Someone may well have done it. Unicorns sense above all our uncertainty of ourselves, our not belonging, our poor talent for letting the miraculous be. Stripped back to primal desecration, our hearts still yearn for unicorns. We trail our mirrors in the waters of sky-stretched ponds. Although they will never look to us for food or shelter unicorns are reluctant to abandon their legend of our existence. Our one virginity is that we are not yet born.

Peter Boyle's latest book - Apocrypha - published by Vagabond Press, won two of the big prizes in 2010 here in Australia.

http://www.vagabondpress.net/Vagabond_Press/New_%26_Forthcoming/Entries/2010/12/4_Congratulations_to_Peter_Boyle.html

I noticed his work when his first book – Coming Home From The World – published by Five Islands Press in 1994, won the NSW Premier's Prize in 1995. So he has been at it for a while, writing wonderful poetry and scooping up the prizes. More power to his elbow.

Tuesday Poem - Metamorphosis by Susan Fealy

       Metamorphosis

         for Franz Kafka, 1883-1924

Cathedral-bird cawdaw jackerdaw,*

a dark plumaged passerine bird.

A jackdaw is kavka in Czech.

The genus of crows and ravens,

it calls in a metallic chyak chyak.

Cathedral-bird cawdaw jackerdaw.

Jackdaws are harbingers of rain,

their under-wings are wire grey,

and kavka means jackdaw in Czech.

His sisters Elli, Valli and Ottla

died in forty-one, two and three.

Cathedral-bird cawdaw jackerdaw.

Greeks tell that a jackdaw falls

seeking his kin in a dish of oil.

A jackdaw is kavka in Czech.

His beak and throat are clattering:

he calls in a metallic chyak chyak.

Cathedral-bird cawdaw jackerdaw.

A jackdaw is kavka in Czech.

*some obsolete names for jackdaw

I heard Susan read this poem at a gathering at Collected Works Bookshop here in  Melbourne and was very taken with it. But I seem to always be very taken with her work. She seems to be able to make the crystal ring with no sense of strain, her words hover and fly. It's almost alchemical. It is a kind of magic.



Tuesday Poem - Lies by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"Telling lies to the young is wrong."

http://poemsbyluislopez.blogspot.com/2005/12/lies-by-yevgeny-yevtushenko.html

This poem was given to my class at school when I was about 16. It had a most profound and powerful effect upon the whole class. Perhaps more than the poem I remember the galvanised electricty that ran through the room. The power of a poem was made manifest. I have to offer the above link because the translation I first read is hard to find. Other translations seem to have superseded it somewhat.

In 2006 I went to the Genoa Poetry Festival mostly because Yevtushenko was a guest. While I was waiting at the Palazzo Ducale for his gig, I walked outside for a cigarette, and a man and a woman dressed in very garish clothes walked swiftly past me up the steps. A phrase rose up in my mind unbidden. "End of the pier." They were for all the world like two ageing but unrepetent cabaret artists who were third on the bill at a concert at the end of the pier in Blackpool or somewhere like that. It was old world yet gallant.

I wondered who they were. It didn't occur to me that they were Yevtushenko plus companion. But of course they were.

He read some recent work, in Italian, which was admirable, and had his show down pat. It was a crowd pleasing performance. It pleased the Italian crowd.

But still I had loved that poem. So at an informal gathering in a bar I approached him and told him what it had meant to me. He was agreeable and told me it was because of Geoffrey Dutton the poem had reached Australia. I didn't confuse things by saying I had read the poem in New Zealand. And then he said something about Stalin. But my mind had seized up the way a fan's mind does sometimes when they are face to face with a childhood hero. I didn't take in the point he was making. I asked if I could take a photo of him. He consented.  

Tuesday Poem - Two Kinds of Stubbornness by Sarah Holland - Batt

Two Kinds of Stubbornness

On his seventieth birthday, my father eats an egg for breakfast;

soft-boiled, with triangles of rye. The eggcup was mine as a child.

Half a man, it stands on ceramic boots, trouser-legs lacquered red,

its belly hollowed out. I always botched my egg; I crashed its head

straight off, and a swell of yolk bled sluggishly down the side.

My father is using a butter-knife. He taps delicately around the

skull as if ringing a spoon against crystal. Tap, tap. His face works

silently, a grave moon the egg is orbiting. He twists the knife-tip

in, levering away a neat helmet of shell. Inside, the orange dome

curves up: bright, intact, surgical. I can't tell you why he keeps his

yolks whole. I break mine, as a matter of principle.

This poem comes from Sarah's book Aria which won the 2007 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and was published by University of Queensland Press.

http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/CategoryBookList.aspx/90/Poetry

I find this poem very attractive in its exactness and precision. And I really like the surgical/principle rhyme.

Tuesday Poem - The Landfall Desk by Janet Frame

I have to post a link to this fascinating poem by Janet Frame because I don't have permission to use it.

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/modernletters/about/desk-poem.aspx

All sorts of other interesting stuff you can find via the link. The photo is my own. I made a pilgrimage to where it now lives when I was in Wellington. The poem is in The Goose Bath which is one of my favourite books.

This poem etc came into my mind because we are shifting in July to a much smaller place and my oldest and my favourite writing desk has to find a new home. I puffed it on facebook and I think it is going to a wonderful poet who lives just up the road a ways from me called Emilie Zoey Baker (Easy Bee) who won the Berlin International Literature Festival Poetry Slam last year!!

Tuesday Poem - Soulmates by Laura Smith

Soulmates

I bought silverbeet
and refused a bag
and as I stepped away from the checkout
it occurred to me
that I was holding it
like a bunch of flowers. But casually,
as those who are often given flowers do.

And for a moment
I walked with a jaunty step,
as those who are often given flowers do.

And I realised
I had chosen it with care,
as do those
who sometimes buy flowers,
pushing some aside to find the best,
freshest,
unbruised bouquet,
the coldest one,
the one with the deepest green,
the deepest folds,
the juiciest scattering of spray-on dew.

And as I sauntered
through the autodoors
into the night
a man
stepped into my pathway
and I thought
he is going to ask for money

but instead he said
"Are those for me?"

and I couldn't help but smile,
because he thought the way I did,
and for a moment I wanted,
more than anything,
to loosen a stem
and give it to him,
like some Shakespearean hero
would give a single rose,
like people who never give flowers
do.

But even though he'd made me smile, and
because I'd expected him to ask for money, and
because the words were already on my tongue
and the movements in my legs, I said
"No, sorry."
and
skirted him,
and
walked away.

© Laura Smith 2008

I heard Laura read this poem at a heat of Poetry Idol at Box Hill Library, and was very taken with the freshness of it. Then Laura started running these excellent readings at Cafe Sospeso which were very inclusive and yet full of surprises and so I got to know her a little. Then she stopped running them and I just never seem to see her around anymore.

By the by I loved Cafe Sospeso because they have this scheme that if you are feeling flush you pay for an extra coffee and it is put on the board, then someone who is a bit short can ask for it. It is a suspended coffee. Last time I was there there were 9 on the board and someone in front of me asked for one and no problem. The girl wiped the board and re wrote 8 and dished a coffee up to the temporarily embarrassed person. 

Laura Smith has edited poetry anthologies and short play collections, and is seeking publication for her first book of poems. In 2010 she was resident Café Poet at BookTalk Cafe, was shortlisted for the Whitmore Prize, and competed in the Poetry Idol Final. An evolving archive of her past works is available on her blog at http://www.laurasmithisbeingapoet.com/