Poems

This, Time

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” ― Oscar Wilde

In the spirit of just getting on with it, I’ve started writing a poem a day. It doesn’t have to be great, I don’t need to spend all day on it, I may not even share it with anyone – and somehow those facts have liberated me. Okay, so this is only day two of the project, but I have a good feeling about it.

I always learn something about myself when I write a poem. Yesterday’s poem had these lines in it:

A future exists again and again I say:
This time is a gift.

My ability to think about the future comes and goes and it’s hugely reassuring when I can see those first rays of light above the horizon again, as I can now.

But the slippery nature of the future means it’s always renewing itself and therefore can exist “again and again.” Also, I need to remind myself that having time to write is a gift, so writing a poem a day is really the least I should be doing with that time, something I remind myself of over and over: “and again I say…”

Seeing the future can also help alleviate my anxiety and hold me in the present – enjoying now with a feeling that the future is going to be okay. “This time” is the present; right here and now is a gift.

Having explained my intention with those lines, I do acknowledge that “This time is a gift” is completely cheesy and the kind of memefied nonsense I’ve railed against in the past. So today I changed it to:

A future exists again and again I say:
This time, it’s a gift.

I hope the same levels of meaning remain: A view of the future exists again and again; the two separate thoughts, one of a future existing again after it had disappeared and one of me again telling myself to enjoy the present; and also the acknowledgement of the gift of free time – but I’m learning something else too. The comma changes “this time” so that the future I now see is a gift, something good, implying I’ve seen it before and it looked unappealing or possibly frightening (a classic role for Future to play).

These altered lines reassure me because the slippery nature of a future (note indefinite article still) is grounded slightly with “this time” – perhaps it won’t elude me this time. There’s something different (probably better) about the nature of the future I see…this time.

There’s a feeling of trust too if a future is being gifted to me and I can relax a little from worrying and straining to see or create it myself.

“This time, it’s a gift” also seems to lend more weight to the nature of time when there’s a pause just after the word and it’s reiterated through the pronoun. It expands beyond the present, which we know we must value and into that future – whatever it is this time – time itself is a gift.

But I’m still left trying to reassure myself “again I say: This time…” as if, naively, I’ve believed in this idea every time with as much conviction as I do now.

 

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The Full Spectrum

In the season of rainbows and tough decisions
I take photos of the sky while driving

easily bamboozled by others
and their desire for me to be okay. I’m not.

I make lists headed Joy and Frustration
feel my body shrink…

and e x p a n d again with determination.

In the season of sun showers and changing rooms
I am the light that reflects and refracts

ride a lazy arc from ex-haustion
to some stifling form of relaxation

and just as I’m bored of the same three chords

this storm turns out to be the perfect combination
of light dispersal in cool precipitation

so I chase it down the back streets home.

(sub)Liminal

I’m a little bit in love with the world again today.
Not just the bright courtyard outside my bedroom door
that eases me into another morning here

or the sea-beyond-rooftops view as I walk down the hill
to this quiet city I know too well

this afternoon city of doors pushed closed
alleyways blocked by bins

streets swept clean by a northerly at least
– it’s the world outside this that fills me with light.

Sent words map out wherever it is you are
snippets of your day in exchange for my evening

a little bit in love and a gallery of images
on trains, at stations: forever moving
or waiting to be moved again.

I am

I am the smell of the unshaken rug
dust warmed by the shifting shapes of sunlight
this long afternoon.

Blossom that once lined streets
russets in gutters like pine needles
its crimson now blooming in bruises above school socks
burns on the backs of our hands.

I am the expected next beat of your raggedy heart
never this beat or the beat just been
I cling in the chill of the pre-rain air.

Talking to boys

Remember when those boys from high school finally grew tall
came back for summer holidays with stories
mostly about drinking, but often about girls
or older women, brazen
emboldened by experience, confessing teenage-long crushes
on you and your friends
using phrases like ‘out of my league’ and ‘punching above my weight’
sporting metaphors incongruous with their still-spindly arms
and narrow shoulders
your own awkward laugh?

Remember when you wanted to start a band, but everyone you knew
was a bass player, like you
and you’d given away your amp anyway after it proved to be
the heaviest thing you owned?

Remember, too, when the sun seemed to beam down on your life
for several days in a row
bright warm views and long evenings
of an active mind ticking off the last of things
last classes, last weeks, last pair of stockings, last days of boots
last time you let yourself dwell in a situation
that keeps you up at night, eyes open, you’d tell yourself, but still in the dark
last days of low-fog on morning hills
a hazy view diffusing street lamp glow
haunting hoot of morepork
last time your pen or mouth runs dry?

Penetralia

She unpacks an endless suitcase
in a room she shouldn’t be in
the woman on the bed cries, “This situation,
you don’t understand,” the woman on the bed is her.

She pulls out clean clothes, dirty clothes
old clothes neatly folded
unfamiliar clothes
that she somehow knows are hers.

A crowd gathers to watch
hovering over her as she removes
evidence of life, receipts, used tissues
the debris of getting on with each day.

“The trick,” she tells herself
lotus-legged and wise
from her position on the bed
“is not to unpack too much at once

not to pour out your heart
when there’s nowhere to pour it
no one’s cupped hands for it to trickle into
be held gently in for a moment

before it’s handed back
more than just neatly intact.”

Tuesday Poem – Manly

I thought we could make fun
of the people at the beach
teenage girls in matching togs
like team colours

flocked together families
with self-conscious mothers
tearaway boys

and the cocky men in board shorts
they would probably grow into.

There were loud foreigners
and bikinis on all sorts of bodies.

But instead we watched
the volleyball players and smiled
at children in sunhats.

You spoke not one
cynical word
and splashed your pale limbs
safely between the flags.

more Tuesday Poems here

Tuesday Poem – The First Farewell

Pokhara 1978
After twenty-eight years he’s here
buying me long blacks
and telling stories from before my time.

One day I’ll document pre-history
let him explain the now through the then
take his word for it and keep it close.

But today I only listen. I’ll say it’s only words.
Until one story ends with tears in our eyes
and I realise I’ve been wrong.

There’s more, of course: the dusty unmarked road
of my family’s village, the crowded bus
the blonde woman in jandals and cheap cotton clothes.

The man who will become my grandfather
in his favourite hat, takes calculated steps
as his son leaves his love to travel on.

He walks his son home with a comforting arm
the story ends in tears, but this is just the first
in a lifetime of constant goodbyes.

 

This poem deserves a bit more editing, but I haven’t posted a Tuesday Poem in ages! It’s all true of course: My dad was recently in NZ for the first time in years and told me a very sweet story about when my mum left Nepal to continue her travels after they first met. Many more meetings and partings ensued. I hope to hear more about these encounters one day too.

Read more Tuesday Poems here

Tuesday Poem – White Lies, by Stanley Motjuwadi

Humming Maggie.
Hit by a virus,
the Caucasian Craze,
sees horror in the mirror.
Frantic and dutifully
she corrodes a sooty face,
braves a hot iron comb
on a shrubby scalp.
I look on

I know pure white,
a white heart,
white, peace, ultimate virtue.
Angels are white
angels are good.
Me I’m black
black as sin stuffed in a snuff tin
Lord, I’ve been brainwhitewashed.

But for Heaven’s sake God,
Just let me be.
Under cover of my darkness
let me crusade.
On a canvas starching from here
to Dallas, Memphis, Belsen, Golgotha,
I’ll daub a white devil.
Let me teach black truth.
That dark clouds aren’t a sign of doom,
but hope. Rain. Life.
Let me unleash a volty bolt of black,
so all around me may know black right.

This poem was given to me by a colleague as a teaching resource.  Stanley Motjuwadi is better known in South Africa as an editor and journalist who lived through the apartheid era and died soon after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990.

I love the play with symbolism here, my favourite being “That dark clouds aren’t a sign of doom,/but hope. Rain. Life.”

Nelson Mandela’s current ill health has reminded me again of the recentness of apartheid and how people can incite great change. This is also apparent in the existence of The Apartheid Museum which opened in 2001.

More Tuesday Poems here.