On the lake, a circle of verbs
On the sheet, a bed of roses

Paula Green

There was so much love for the first suite of couplets I have assembled a second one. I am often drawn to a single couplet on the page in a poetry collection, to how it can lead you deeper within the poem or carry you beyond its borders, on wings made of fire or clover honey or garden path. Couplets can rhyme or not rhyme, they might cluster together in suites, hide secrets, get personal, enigmatic, visually descriptive, opt for tongue-in-cheek or serious edge. Couplets are open-poem zones, and I love that. I love how they drop into my head in the middle of the night and send me into sweet miniature wordfalls.

Thank you to all the poets who contributed to Couplets 2.

Couplets 2

Cilla McQueen

Turtles

Consider, poet,
Whose backs you’re standing on.

Megan Kitching

Irrepressible

Look: in the crack at the turn
of this verse, a dandelion.

Sirens

Each morning, the plangent sounds
of shorebirds make harder demands.

Always greater than

The questions if only I’d asked >
The years we coincided.

Anuja Mitra

Incision

When memory strikes, it slices clean through:
sharp, then hot, in the way of a wound.

Joshua Toumu’a

small funeral / carbon zero

the day we lowered my mother into the earth,
the countryside rejected her body and swelled up with frost.

A Pearl

Spitting sand into the kitchen sink! Alas,
we have not yet found a pearl made of our grief.

Making Sense

What’s to a year but another ring?
What’s to a cat but to look at a king?

Vincent O’Sullivan

Chrysalis

A train enters a tunnel.
Comes out as sky.

in Blame Vermeer, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2007

Os

My initials are bone to the end,
life gone flat out.

in Blame Vermeer, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2007

Watching the Hawkduns

Look, let your eye track them, eastward and back,
Rucking their curtains along winter’s rack.

in Further Convictions Pending: Poems 1998 – 2008, THWUP, 2009

Murray Edmond

Once, a tick and tock of mechanical clocks.
Now, digital silence, like walking in socks.

Le coeur dans le coeur, la larme dans la larme,
Pour cette chanteuse et sa voix et son charme.

Ēnei ngā rā o te wā Matariki,
E iwa ngā whetu ki runga piki.

When it comes to literary crime,
The worst of all: couplets that don’t rhyme!

 Elizabeth Smither

The trampoline instructor’s wake
sends her adoring pupils into space

Kay McKenzie Cooke

light fight

A candle in the sun.
What cancels out the other? Neither one.

out of time

Funny how when talking to someone with dementia
time turns to jelly

she liked him

She liked him and when in the middle of an animated discussion
his glasses slipped off his nose, she liked him even more

Fiona Kidman

My sinuses are a saxophone, the music of the face
singing to me, my face pressed against the pillow .

Sitting beneath a feijoa tree eating green grey
flesh in greedy gulps without a spoon.

Majella Cullinane

Morning Prayer
After Tchaikovsky 

Half-way through your journey you are called out. 
From the dimmed room of your making, we watch

you moving like a corridor across a sea, 
or the cool fingers of autumn stroking a tree. 

Your small hand flexes and tightens, your spine
curves against me like a horseshoe, a strung bow. 

The brazen scarlet of gum tree fades on the hill
and like the season, it is still early days for you and me; 

for my bones to soften, my body to swell. Wait
for me in the undertow of waves. It is there

I will catch you my little boy, and when
you emerge we can explore the novelties of light.

from Guarding the Flame, Salmon Poetry, 2012

Reihana Robinson

wild, wild turkey sauntering by
leave a feather to haunt my eye

as evidence of your dusky stroll
past fence and field, you rock and roll

a sing-song gait by any standards
interrupted by evening bandits

from ‘Crow‘

James Norcliffe

After the forthcoming plague

Long after the humans left, the rehearsal room was empty.
Still, each morning in the canopy, the birds sang Colonel Bogey.

Footnote to Sodom

Sulphur made the camels sick,
but Mrs Lot was good to lick

Claire Orchard

Dog park reflection

Zeus would be well-suited to a leadership role.
Even, I dare say, a ministerial portfolio.

Prop

Now I’m using a crutch, people stop 
and talk to me a lot.

Whenever I encounter men on crutches 
they always suggest we race.

Wow, men on crutches have
grandiose ideas of their own abilities.

Washing line

A sky full of soft, pale sheets
flapping away away away.

If the wind ceased maybe the silence 
would be unbearable.

Summer is ending and it always 
goes like this, in just a minute.

Next to water I think I most appreciate 
sunlight.

I had a thought then about sunlight but
it faded.

On the path, a song of winter
On the tongue, an urgent whisper

Paula Green