Tuesday Poem - Death like a shy doorframe by De Er He

Death like a shy doorframe


Death is like a shy doorframe

All Mother ever did was put her hand on it for support a little while

Before it, becoming lower and lower

Turned into a photo frame -

In tight support of Mother.



Translated by Ouyang Yu

http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/ouyang-yu

This poignant little apercu first appeared in the Weekend Australian Review and then in The Best Australian Poems 2012.

Tuesday Poem - Snow by Louis MacNeice

Snow 

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

This has been one of my favourite poems for 50 years. 

And I don't quite know why it is. Now I can see that

it is in a conversation with other poetry. 

For instance Graves' Warning To Children. 

And as I was googling I came upon a kind of riposte poem, 

an anti numinous poem by Geoffrey Hill. 

But when I first found it in an anthology it came into my 

consciousness in a very free and clear way. And I hold onto that.

Tuesday Poem - Sometimes I Wonder What's Going On by Matt Hetherington

Sometimes I Wonder What’s Going On

she turns up wanting space

she’s not wearing green again

why aren’t her kids making her happy?

she wants to up her dosage

to where it was

before she cancelled the ceremony

she needs to start smoking again

but her mother has just given up

she can’t remember what she forgot

she has a different voice for everyone she knows

someone dedicated a book to her

but she was smarter and never read it

she’s like an avocado inside-out

she likes to renovate her hair

her brain is like a magazine

she apologises but can’t tell you why

while she’s smoking a joint

she tells you

you’re the only thing wrong with her life

she doesn’t see

it’s going to burn her

and you don’t tell her

Previously published in fourW and The Best Australian Poems 2012

Tuesday Poem - from Collusion by Brook Emery

Perhaps the first thing I notice is the sound of pages being
turned. Crease, uncrease. Crack. Almost like a whip. This
is pre-determined, but difficult to anticipate. That’s one.
There’s another.

The second thing I notice is the way the paper is impressed,
the way the pens are squeezed. This must be necessity.
Sometimes pens dangle like cigarettes from lips in silent
movies.

I notice eyelids. Visible because the gaze is on the
intersection of pen and paper. The faces look like plaster,
even the tanned and swarthy ones. When eyes are raised
the focus doesn’t shift. This is concentration or some drug.

Eight rows across, sixteen down the length. Walls a lemon-
textured grey. A clock lacks numbers and an hour hand.
Suspended from the ceiling twelve independent moons
distribute almost even light.

Now someone stretches her arms above her head, rotates
her torso against a chair’s resistance, then pushes fingers
through her hair, pinned and tied to stop distraction. This
is still distraction.

Something about the silence is amiss. Yes, every cough or
crack or scraping of a chair is startling, but beneath it all I
hear a low collective hum as though, unorchestrated, every
throat is growling.

I think of a scriptorium but the analogy is wrong. I think
of mass production but this is also wrong. I think of
cryptographers, the word ‘enigma’, prisoners, turbines,
cells, a multi-bodied brain,

schoolgirls taking an exam, an olive grove, a graveyard, an
aviary of tethered birds, but metaphor is beside the point
as they are beside each other, separate and linked; and the
growling, it’s insistent now.

Here is a poem from Brook Emery's intriguing new book Collusion (John Leonard Press). 

Tuesday Poem - Boys Own Annual by Rhyll McMaster

Boys Own Annual

What a shame

girls aren't more like boys.

Girls want to change the rules.

What a shame

they don't ever play the game.

In a Boys Own Annual view of life

the punch, the grab, the shout are haute couture.

The moon-about is paramount.

Boys need never realise, need not be clever.

Boys need not mature.

Girls don hats and gloves their mothers wore

and play at Houses under trees.

Girls are bossy.

They seem to like responsibilities,

don't love the mystery of scraped knees.

Boys like the smell and sometimes-touch of boys,

their stop-start world, well-debated challenges,

hatched plans never carried out,

the detached stare.

Boys like it when they never have to care.

Boys know girls are the enemy

because girls keep calling in the debt.

Girls block the light that's shining

straight down on Boys Own Mighty Heaven,

that glazed place where time's ephemeral, yet set

where boys can rest their case

without entering a plea

and wander home at sunset

for their tea.

This poem is from Rhyll's newest book – Late Night Shopping – published by Brandl & Schlesinger. The book is such a delight. Sharp and funny and eloquent.

http://brandl.com.au/recent-titles/late-night-shopping

Tuesday Poem - Two Short Poems by Luke Beesley

Peacock peacock

In Tagore's last poems he imagines words popped of

    meaning

loose, in the sky, nonsense syllables, pure colour

At the post office I watch a man for an hour

sew my parcels with a large needle

a purple full stop on his thumb

I never saw the Taj Mahal.

             I write I never saw the Taj Mahal

             but write 'sew' instead of 'saw'

             I never sew

Short story

His ear lit up like a daffodil

He found four bees in his car

It was a leap year. February rushed

past like formula one

a twist of tomato

in the alcohol

Luke Beesley lives in Melbourne. These insidious little poems are in his recent book 'Balance” from Whitmore Press.

http://whitmorepress.wordpress.com/

Tuesday Poem - In The Voice Of A Tree by Michelle Leber

IN THE VOICE OF A TREE

for Georgina King (1845-1932)

Do not marry if you wish to develop your talent

                                                          ― George Bennett

Her warm curve on my spine―

it’s like this each day. She’s reading

with her little sighs, pressing a book

to her hillocks, as if absorbing my ancestors

by way of brooding osmosis.

No one knows what she reads.

Some days she writes letters,

packing faultless flowers between paper

and lets the laughing dove take them

across meadows, over mountains,

to enter Mueller’s chamber as he sits

with Termination Lake specimens

in the drafty acreage of his esteem. 

No one knows what he reads.

A dandelion seed has taken sentry

in her hair. For the view. For companionship.

Ants devising better ways to reach honey,

by-pass the flighty blooms of her sleeve

that puff like batwings onto her page.

No one knows what she reads.

If I could, I’d insist she reconcile

her natural beauty. When her head

turns to a bee, rises on its tower to meet

with clouds, she is more than kindred:

how shall we commune, together admire

our mandate with petalite, tuff beds, fern allies.

I am bending my branches.

No one knows what she reads.

Note: First published in a different form by Westerly 57.2: Nov 2012 

  

Michelle Leber lives in Melbourne and is writing a series of poems about women naturalists. Each one I come across, either in journals, or when she reads them to us at various poetry events around town, or when she tables one at a monthly workshop at my place, I am entranced by their delicacy and pungency and cogency.