‘So Sang a Little Clod of Clay’
William Blake
When it hurts, but she doesn’t say;
when it dulls, but he still gives praise.
When she bites, but he refuses rage
and he walks free, yet she stays.
When they wait through blunt dismay
although they ache as the children play
this is tread and bootgrind
this is hope’s hard labour
this is the heart’s ripe savour
this is the sting of healing
this is the rope of time —
and love is dust
ignited
in fleet, golden murmuration.
©Emma Neale
New Coat
This late summer morning is learning how to breathe
while Reina embroiders on the lanai shaded by our rainbow umbrella
Pete and Willie of Villa Magic have taken five weeks to burn
scrape and sand off our villa’s century-old skin and replace it
In the kowhai a lone cicada’s love call sounds like the imperious
snapping of fingers ordering our villa to rise up
in its new coat of iceberg white
and plum trimmings: its radiance will wrap round Reina’s
fingers and needle
and the morning will breathe in admiration
© Albert Wendt April 2014
I, Melchior
To be honest, I didn’t know Baz or Casper
before we took the trip. We studied
in different cities and my focus was on the history of stars
while Casper predicted movement. Neither of us
know what Baz studied exactly, but it was good
having him around.
Many nights over the small flame of our fire
we guessed at why the dream chose us,
and most days I wondered if I was a fool
to leave my life’s work for a single light.
Traveling west we saw the far reaches
of an empire whose gold leafed crown
would wrap around the head of every
nation if it could. I didn’t mind the welcome
given to us by its governors and princes,
the cold limoncello and soft cheeses, the grapes
brought to our mouths by slender bangled wrists;
But there was something about that king—rouged
and fat, chewing a leg of meat, feeding us like we
were to be eaten next, asking exactly who it was
we were off to see—that reminded me not to be a man
given to appetite. I closed my eyes to the women
and remembered there was somewhere
I was supposed to be going.
The last days of travel were quiet, thirsty days,
full of dust and flies. Nights we slept close in the dark,
because Baz insisted we not light any fires. We argued
about whether we were on course and what we were
looking for in the first place until we found ourselves
under the star, at the door of a house.
It was nothing really. A poor place and the girl
who answered the door was about fourteen, with a naked baby
looking out at us from behind her skirts where he stood.
Casper shoved me and I almost spoke, but didn’t.
Baz knelt, and that decided it. I lowered myself to my knees
right in the doorway, and as I did I felt something
no book has ever been able to explain. Some strange peace,
the sound of beating wings filled the air and the child laughed.
We unloaded our treasures and as we did his mother’s
face was wet with tears. She didn’t look at the spices,
she wasn’t marveling at the cost. Her head was tilted,
her mouth slightly open as if dreams she’d had
were playing out before her. It was enough,
her silent grace, the child’s laugh–to answer at least
the only question worth asking. We left at dusk
into a different world than we had come from.
The first sleep in the desert brought us the same nightmare;
a slaughter of children and the rouged king’s laughter
heard above the moan of young mothers. We parted ways
in the dark, with a vow to never look for each other again
for fear of killing the King we’d found.
Did we find what we were looking for, or were we meant
to find something that would take all of history to unravel?
I think about Baz, face to the ground in that doorway,
when a star falls suddenly from the sky and wind blows out the last embers of fire.
©Amy Leigh Wicks
On the eve of my 53rd birthday
After Gregory Corso
Once I was very small but then I grew up
and other things were small and nothing hurt
like it did when I was sixteen, and again
at twenty-one. Fifty-fucking-three!
The poems I wrote and the poems I shouldn’t
have written but they’re done now and in books
nobody, absolutely nobody,
ever reads. There was some craziness,
and sometimes I was alone and other times
I was not alone, and alone was better
but I was lonely. To be honest,
the craziness didn’t amount to much.
The confessional stopped working about
the time I had things to confess, and now —
now I’d have to spend the rest of my life
in there and still never get to the end
of it, fuck it, I may as well carry on.
My hair was long and straight but went springy
in my thirties then straight again but not
as straight as before. Now it’s mostly grey
but I don’t really care about it.
I let it grow and grow and then I cut
it all off. I imagine it growing
when I’m lifeless in my coffin, masses
of it, which is unpleasant to think of
and anyway not yet. I want more life
in front of me than I have behind me,
but that’s not about to happen. I want
a bell down there, in the wormy darkness,
like in the Edgar Allan Poe story,
or a buzzer, a buzzer I can press
and somebody to listen just in case.
©Tim Upperton
Town
In the small town with
the grey clouds like
quiet dogs
on the veranda with our
feet up watching ghosts
in the old corner garden
where the oleander dips deep
I am myself and not myself
again and again and again
until you find me through
the small water in my wrist
the channel where the darkest
fish run to the lake in my palm
It is raining.
You hold my arm there, on
the Formica-topped table
with more gravity than a
metal earth
softer than a soft sea.
I am yours driving down and
diving
homing around and around
and back again.
©Sugar Magnolia Wilson
Drycleaners: London and Paris
A little girl like a shepherdess receives
my knit top with a tomato stain
and returns the docket. Tuesday.
On Tuesday it’s hanging on a hanger
the spot shrunk but still visible.
I can’t complain to a shepherdess
who has lost one stain but carries its ghost
in her demeanour like a lost lamb.
I take it to another drycleaner.
In Paris the spot is onion soup.
Briskly it is frowned over: one week
to remove it, Madame. Not sooner.
It will take a special discovery of benzene
an accident like Tarte Tatin
and rows of girls in chemises
sweating over garments in poor ventilation.
No wonder we should sniff at improvements
in Paris and failure in London.
©Elizabeth Smither
Flammable
The world was flammable, we knew it was.
Our hair lit up with candle-light, we peeled off
the wax from the table and made it into
something beautiful, tender as the high voices
of the castrati, fine as smoke through the grain
of an old LP, a radiance through their song
like the flame of a wick slowly burning,
burning in its casing of wax. We all felt it.
We all had wine to drink, the dregs
in our glasses covered over with a new tide
of wine from a new bottle, a taste
like the tone of a clarinet with an old reed, old
but not frayed, pliable as smoke and thick
as wax. And then the morepork in the pine forest
sounded its two sad notes, singing
its “I-Thou” song to an absence, an absence
felt by every one of us, our futures dark
to us, so close and so alight.
© Anna Jackson
Mrs Zeus
In her dream she lived in a high apartment
with a few small children. She looked down at the rain.
Gulls fought over bread, over the alphabet.
Her new husband walked to work every day.
Lucky man – he hated driving.
She had only married him to change her name.
Mrs Acorn! She would always be first in the queue.
© Bill Manhire 2016
I have had a fabulous year on both my blogs – even in a year when I was on a blog budget with my head down writing and researching a big book.
My time in the archives researching our early women poets has been utterly addictive. Such discoveries, such a joy.
This year has seen a feast of New Zealand poetry from small presses and big presses and everything in between.
Even though next year is another blog budget year, I have a few new things I want to add with a little help. This blog wouldn’t work without you reading it, sharing it, contributing and picking up on books to read and events to attend.
So a very big thank you! And happy summer days. I intend delving into the blog’s annual list and tracking down a few books that caught my attention.
