POEMS

A sample of my poetry.

mobile home

In this camping ground
the woman with the purple bob,
a towel under her arm, walks
every morning
away from her mobile home
over to the shared bathroom.

Looking down from above the harbour
the row of boats below very quickly become your friends.
You notice when one is missing.
See clouds as big as gods.
Appreciate the importance of a hedge.
Hear the sea sounding closer at night.

My granddaughter’s collection of stalks, of grass,
of dandelions, stones, leaves, shells,
her mother weaves into a wreath.
When I leave
this place will still be here.

~*~

Southern Cross

The evening cold and clear
and the stars all out. We look
for the Southern Cross
tilting
our heads right back.
Until we find it
directly overhead, like a centre seam
in a knitted hat.
And it is perfect. Just sitting there.
Pointing out.

~*~

shopping alone

Time mocks me as it slides by with the sun,
turning memories only five years old
into sentiment and making me miss
certain people now gone from this place.
No chance now of bumping into them down town.

In the cleanest Public Toilets
I look at myself in the mirror afraid
that what I see isn’t the real me,
or alternatively, is only too real;
the reflection of someone shopping alone.

I leave designer shop-frontages, clever arrangements
in windows, to arrive at dog-eared Rattray Street,
then take a detour to Stafford’s SaveMart
where pretension is a foreign concept
and friends take cheerful intakes of breath
at surprise finds. Where I am content
among the smell of other people,

where I don’t have to try
Because I know where these people are coming from
and why they stay. I feel myself relax
into a ball of happy plasma.

~*~

why did we think we were ugly?

When we were young, why did we not see
how shaped like flowers our mouths? How clear

like sun on water
our eyes? We simply did not know how

to shove off the sly approach
of a jealous future

marring our present
with its map bleeding dark ink.

~*~

things I worry about needlessly

A car crash south of Herbert.
The perfect space between
anything. The power of recurrent memories.
Pencils or pens?
The tulips in the garden,
are they aero-dynamic
enough to withstand today’s sou’-westerly,
tomorrow’s nor’easterly, the cold blast
from the heat pump?
Whether yesterday, my response
may have been a little too
passive-aggressive? I worry,
do my salads measure up?
Will my neighbour get his shirts in
off the line before it rains? I worry
about my sister’s hens and if
we have enough ice, or forks.
I worry about the earth’s core,
the stars, the moon and my own heart
whether it will withstand
the universe without me in it.

~*~

cool elegance

I ask it to leave the inside of my house,
if it’d be so kind, via the window,
or door, both of which I’ve opened
for the purpose.

Most of the time they do,
executing a smooth and dignified exit.

After all, their uninvited entry
into this country was as late as 1945
meaning that my parents, as children,
never saw a wasp.

It could be argued
that any wasp’s farewell
from where it was not welcomed
in the first place, is only fair.

Armed with a sting that serves
as self-defence and attack
as well as the intelligence to understand

that it does in fact owe us one,
I have found that when asked to leave,
a wasp will bow out
with the rapier-thin, dapper indifference

of a cool and dangerous elegance,
bearing the superior air of a guest
taking liberties, but at the same time
making certain of claims
it is not about to fully surrender.

~*~

in bits

‘I think that like the food we eat we are made of the things that make us feel comfortable. Our routines, our favourite chairs, our pets, our favourite topics of conversation, our opinions – they’re not who we are, exactly, but they allow us to access who we feel we are.’ Ashleigh Young

I find it in the one game rose
that has outlasted winter. In a hammock.
In a memory of a pot of murky Milo
steaming at the back of a coal range
its wooden fender
pocked with scorch marks
from embers. In the falling
note of a chaffinch’s song
to mark the end of daylight.

In the colour of a granddaughter’s hair
the shade of tussock, of bracken,
of sun on ground, of pine, of poured tea.

In notes
left on the kitchen bench:
‘Corn fritters
In the warming drawer.’
‘Leave the dishes, I’ll do them later.’

In a lake. In orange poppies. In the smell
of growing cabbages, of sweet peas,
bruised geraniums, sea-soaked kelp, a warm tractor.
In a piece of blue beach glass. The quiver of rain
on ferns. In photos of the faces
of my parents when they were still alive,
in the faces of my children now fully grown.
In the smooth gleam of an acorn,
in sun warmed stones.

In the taste of beer. In the view of the city
as you approach from the south.
In the view of the city
as you approach from the north.
In the scent of a sleeping child.
In a piece of cold egg-and-bacon pie
eaten on top of a hill, among tussock,
under a trig station.

In the weight of wool. In an afternoon nap.
Toast. Horses. Contentment coming to me
in pieces. Never all at once. In bits
just big enough and no more.
Like the sight from behind of a brown vintage car,
a travelling time capsule spinning
along on narrow, spindly wheels
along Musselburgh Rise.

~*~

above the line

Above, a black-backed gull
grifts the high way
only gulls trawl,
a sky-valley current
that streams between
beach and harbour.

I look up, see its chest
feathers ironed white by light,
its black wings
rowing west
towards today’s catch:

fish entrails, road kill,
mud crab. I note
how it hauls its cargo
of intent, watch
until it disappears
behind the tips
of trees, envision

the movement, the trail
it leaves
behind, that caught
rude disturbance
of time’s dead air.

~*~

‘so close no matter how far’ – a line from Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’

He bites his fingernails, his teeth
clomping like boots. We have all
been summoned to the Principal’s office,
son and parents, where he’s told in front of us
there will be no more warnings and about the nature
of institutions / this school, how once
you’re asked to leave, it will be as if
you never existed.

There will be a confidence course
and counselling on self-esteem
with blobs ‘which blob
best depicts you?’ We are all going to have to learn
to say No. There will be days
when he cannot be found
even though it’s plain to see
he’s there in the kitchen, making a sandwich.
There will be deep voices on the phone. Boys
who sound like men.

~*~

convolvulus

Beside me, the wind is whistling
a fine tune through a gap it has found
in the frame between
a window’s glass and sill
as outside, each flower petal bends
in order
to survive what I imagine
to be their lament
for this present disappearance of warmth
it is their complaint
against summer’s cold shoulder

as the southern rata slowly bleeds scarlet
bristles on to concrete
I choose not to recall betrayals
and instead attempt a dumb embrace
of a jet’s overhead tumult
as it heads north.

~*~

so green it’s blue

This music I listen to is homesick
for a bayou. It is a foreign accent
in a suburb gurgling with lawnmowers
performing breaststroke
through oceans of grass; swirling
with the catfight-maul of electric saws.
It is music that picks
and talks of grass so green it’s blue.
It is music that pines. This plucked banjo
I listen to in my home far
from any Virginian heart breaker,
piano pedal pusher, is so agile
it trips the light
like a highland dancer performing
the Sword Dance, pointing toes
over invisible steel ropes that
twang, even in the rain, with the sweetness
of a guitar bleeding blue, it reaches
through to stop the heart in its train tracks,
here in this small city fastened
to fast-cooled volcanic remains, built to last
upon the crust of hardened magma.

~*~