Tag Archives: Poetry

How it Happened that a Carpenter Found a Piece of Wood that Wept and Laughed Like a Child

by

Marisa Cappetta 2013

A faint pulse beats in the heart of the tree he fells.
The keen edge of his plane wakes her from a three hundred year sleep,

wakes her from dreams of thickets,
wolves and dark cottages hidden deep in the forest.

Her darling, her carpenter, carves her hands –
a journeyman who earned his nails building fortresses for tyrants

sees her thoughts like a shadow-show and even he,
a man accustomed to ebony halls and adumbral woods,

wonders if he should stop while she is half finished.
Contradictory, ungrateful! her thoughts shout

and he fears for the child taking shape in his hands.
He continues his work long into the moonless night.

Persistence turns her bark to skin and before he can varnish her
she becomes a real girl with an oakish consciousness.

A Comet’s Tale

by

Colin Basterfield 2013

In between the stars there be comets
They slide across the sky like silk over linoleum
Chalk the void where only dark matter tends to matter
A lifetime might not be enough to see their kind again
So we remember the day
Hale-Bopp brush-stroked our night
Kennedy took a bullet
Jeff Buckley’s boots filled with mud

But what of the comet’s tale?
Constituent parts of us
Composites beyond atoms, like Lego?
Where only imagination limits
Thought, love, compassion, creativity, beauty, morals, art, ethics
Does imagination limit dark matter?
And as a point of order
Without light, does dark matter really matter?
Among orders of matter
Is it a matter of order
Between light and dark matters?
Or is the order of what matters
Simply a matter of choice

When out there the universe is expanding in all directions
Everything is accelerating away from everything else
But how can that be when you’re standing right there
You’re so close your light arrives without delay
Yet when we turn away,
You too will recede,
Dressed in red shift
Perhaps to play another game
Of statues, on pedestals
As we shift to blue

For Steph Jones

Blackboy Peaches

by

Victoria Broome 2013

Come at the end of summer,
no one really knows their story,
although peaches did originate from China.
In her childhood my mother’s mother
stewed them until dark, dark crimson
they bled into the white tapioca on the plate.

I have come to love them in their furry,
mauve grey skin and watch them as they ripen
on the tree. They grow in France;
or did several centuries ago, the Peche de Vigne,
grown among the grapes to indicate disease.
That is a preferable name; the vineyard peach.

The fruit of warning, heart red flesh,
the sweetness beneath the difficult skin,
the one worth waiting for, the one that comes
as daylight saving ends, the one that comes
around the same time as the resurrection.
The one, like a shadow in the garden,
that Mary calls to and finds; it is her son.

The Zookeeper Sings the Blues

by

Jeni Curtis

I’m here to keep the animals, wolf, bear or kangaroo,
I’m the keeper of the animals, wolf, bear or kangaroo,
we aim for preservation, that’s the purpose of a zoo.

They live in their enclosures behind tall strong iron bars,
dwell in their enclosures, behind tall safe iron bars,
so people can enjoy them, their claws, their jaws, their scars.

You can hear the snarling tiger, and feel the lions roar,
the snarling fierce tiger, the resounding lion’s roar,
the squawking of the parrots, toucan, lorikeet, macaw.

The lemur from Madagascar has a long ringed curly tail,
he came from Madagascar with his long ringed curly tail,
to live in a foreign country, behind bars as if in jail.

The grey-backed hippopotamus, she swelters in her pool,
the gap-toothed hippopotamus rolls over in her pool,
it’s round and small and shallow, no way to keep her cool.

Their eyes watch me constantly, topaz, agate, amber,
I feel their eyes follow me, topaz, agate, amber,
they bore me like stigmata, with reproachful silent clamour.

The Romans they had circuses, the Spanish they have bulls,
the Romans had bread and circuses, the Spanish slaughter bulls,
all forms of entertainment to satisfy the fools.

The saddest of the animals, the big black chimpanzee,
he huddles in the corner, the sad-eyed chimpanzee,
we contemplate each other, which is him and which is me?

So many are endangered, we keep these in reserve
we’ve killed off all their brothers, we keep these in reserve,
if we manage now to save them, it’s more than we deserve.

One day I’ll take my keys and I’ll open every door
I’ll take my bunch of keys and open every gate and door
I’ll make a bid for freedom, reverse to jungle law.

But for now I take my bucket, filled with bone or grain
I take my metal bucket filled with bone and flesh and grain
I whisper to the animals, “you’ll soon be home again.”

an extract from Maukatere: floating mountain

by

Bernadette Hall 2013

caged and crafted

like Gregor Samsa

in Kafka’s Metamorphosis

 

who is there willing to glow

like the wet stones in the wire gabion,

like underwater pulses

 

the acolyte shows me a leaf

‘we were born on that leaf, on that shoot,

our family’, she says

 

‘and I am one of the best leapers’

how lovely to walk with my arm around her waist

‘I am my own conman’ she says

 

and she repeats it

like the blade of light

that repeats itself

 

as it leaps off coca leaves

into the river

‘so this is it, she says, ‘this is the gold rush’

 

© BERNADETTE HALL    2013