Rain in bouts and shouts
pelts and belts or it will glow
green and grey, sea spray a clear day.

We drive through town, round hill to town
down small streets and railway tracks
across kilometres of nothing
but scrag and scrub,
cliffs of coal and bracken bush.

Terse service in a worse cafe
soft sammies chips pots of tea
and coffee if  we can.  Drive on

next town, green signs show the way
round hill over bridge through town,
abandoned cars and branded cows,
boarded windows daggy sheep, rivers
the milky colour of discarded tea.

Surging sea seething surf
a mist of salt above battered rocks
wearing thin.  Drive on.

© Saradha Koirala 2011

Lineage – a prezi poem

The last few apples
hang colourless, still
surrounded by curled leaves.
That smell.

Wooden floors
throw back complaints
outdoors merges in.
Years have passed.

Still. A silent ceremony
brown spots on thin skin
a windfall, crestfall.
Fruitless again.

© Saradha Koirala 2011

With my bad eyesight
and your bad accent
a discarded bag of takeaways
is a crumpled fallen beast
and all your stuff
has become your staff.

© Saradha Koirala 2011

The night’s air is audibly cold
Dust and light whorls, unseen
Imagined icicles pierce through
A blizzardous, bilious cry.

Dust and light whorls, unseen
Highlights of imperfection
A blizzardous, bilious cry
Then a rush of echoing space.

Highlighted imperfections
The dullness lies muffled and strained
No rush of echoing space
Just muted, frozen and raw.

The dullness lies muffled and strained
A thick rug, a peeled wall
Just muted, frozen and raw
Unearthing all the wrong words.

A thick rug, a peeled wall
Remember, there’s always been life
Unearthing all the wrong words
Understanding every shuffle and start.

Remember, there’s always been life
The night’s air, audibly cold
Understand every shuffle and start
Imagine icicles piercing through.

Based on a task set for The 820s – read some much better versions of this exercise here!

Drawn from your bed mid-dream
you are vaporous like the bulbous clouds
the hill-like bulges that are cloud-like hills.

You are the man in the background
of Chagall’s Green Violinist
contorted but happy and with no thoughts today.

There is colour in the breeze
a tune in every brush stroke
every movement filled with expectation.

Your levity defies gravity and gravity
cannot force you still. So you rise still higher.
Your naïve wings of puppet strings.

Stay out of reach.
Be weird, be light.

Happy Birthday, Tuesday Poem!
Watch as the communal birthday poem evolves!

1. Some of the things I know about
2. Because, fiction
3. The truth about fallen leaves
4. Some thoughts to keep you up at night
5. Some nights to keep your thoughts awake
6. Some keep their thoughts awake, oh night
7. Indelible
8. Dilutable
9. Only
10. Ladybug ladybug ladybug red.

I’m drawn again to my mother’s jewellery.
Not those she’s owned – oversized earrings of the eighties,
hand-crafted bracelets from Asian markets
or the chunky silverwork she made in the seventies –

but the ring she had modified for my twenty-first:
a silver cage added to her wedding band
holding a blood-red garnet from Kashmir
during travels before my time.

I’ve been wearing the earrings
gifted at another significant date
one lost, confessed, replaced
they whistle gently, spinning as I walk.

There were garnets again at graduation
two small studs and a matching one
threaded on a thin silver chain,
delicately linking the past to my newly laid path.

The recycled glass pendant we bought together
a memento of a strenuous tramping trip.
Mine concentric rings of wine bottle necks
while hers is more elegantly crafted.

I thought the carelessly dropped list last Christmas:
Saradha, necklace would have spoilt the surprise
but I didn’t know how the string of cut glass would
send prisms of blue and amber around every room I’m in.

And now this cupid cameo in old fashioned green.
She’d watched my reaction carefully to help her choose
when we shopped together, our gentle patter like precious stones
or the sound a timpani might make if you only knew it by name.

 

© Saradha Koirala 2011

My grandparents’ house once stood
mud and thatch, a stone’s throw
in a pool of progression.

The resulting rings told of new technologies,
expanding family
a rippling out of concrete houses
evolution
in a small plot of land.

A push over though,
and structured like a dunked biscuit.
History worth preserving, perhaps
but no longer a liveable home.

We stay on the same spot
some floors up
in my father’s unfinished building.
Solid and warm
in handmade bricks and steel

its foundations are deep enough
for storeys to come
its foundations strong in the stories past.

© Saradha Koirala 2011

I have just returned from Nepal where my dad is building a house (ghar) on the family land.

Harbour (1)

Dead photo surface,
reminiscence, and widowed stains of shadow matter.
Metalucent cut waves and forcing
to fold into brine like pleating.

Like something that is obvious –

Carson McCullers by the sea.
Roberto Bolano by the sea.
Yukio Mishima by the sea.
Leslie Scalapino by the sea.
Tennessee Williams by the sea.

The smells that the weather has perpetually
trapped and matured. Greenhouse green
all the time.

The lean worst place is
where my parents
took us for long walks the
wind inviting fury as a friend
and my cheeks. Salty distaste and stinging.
They’d say ‘a walk along the
South Coast’ – the same word with different knowledge.

Fluid naming, no point of reference, this
water is all the same, but I don’t
mind having shags pointed out to
me.
Favourable conditions to muster sea animals in
tepid rivulets off beaks can drip
and dip my toes in twice, too familiar.

Brother who throws the seaweed
at my face, “you’re dead.” Quiet lapping
and just so, thankless dunes loom
whom never get wet.

 

Bernadette says this is part of three poems about Wellington Harbour, tied to experiences from her childhood and the present.

I love the ghostly feel of the past drifting in and out of photo-like images.