53. Adrift on Poetry

The Birth of Juno, 22nd February 2011

Deep Fish
Cats' Comforts
Waikato Breakfast

Nous Sommes du Soleil

Black Holes
Summer Evening,January 1985
Greece 1998

Reflections

A Birthday Dragon

“She Fumed… He Froze”

The Tennis Racquet
Sophie's Fan

Adrift, Golden Bay
A Waiting Day
Gestures from the Heart
When I am done and gone

DEEP FISH

Deep fish
Live deep deep down
And you can only catch them
By chance
Or by knowing where to fish
The point at which
To break the ice
Or cast the line.

It’s cold deep down
And dark too
But safe from predators
And their fishing hooks
Yet just now and then
I am tempted up
To smell the fear
And breathe the air
Where the sunlight is.



CATS’ COMFORTS

Were we those people too
The people of our past
Were those the things we did
The clothes we wore
The jokes we laughed at
The dreams we dreamed

Were we the rush-hour crowd
The business-suited
City-polluted commuters
Standing clear of the doors
Deafened by the shrill whistle
For the departing suburban train.

Did we give up all that
For the quiet life
For a view of the stars at night
For the smell of the sea
The wind in the face
Cats’ comforts.



WAIKATO BREAKFAST

The cleansing dawn
Derides despair
Food is optimism
I feel a song of
Cornflakes and peaches
Double egg bacon and tomatoes
Toast and honey
Coffee with cream
And sunlight emerging
From the Waikato mist



NOUS SOMMES DU SOLEIL

As I step into the sun
I feel as fragile as a newborn child
I cross the road with care
Yet beneath the screening trees
Still I know
The quiet despair
The unshed tear.



BLACK HOLES

I’ve seen the barren lands
The lands beyond hope
Searched the black holes within
And found
No colourful kaleidoscope
Only a flat and dreary plain
Of wasted years
Of pointless pain
And the merrygoround again.



SUMMER EVENING, JANUARY 1985

In slippers and walk shorts

my brother-in-law

picking his teeth

gazes emptily out the kitchen window

waiting on waiting

the clock ticks toward eight

the parsley sauce hardens

the element set to ‘low’

dinner long since ready

to serve a wayward wife

from the corner of the lounge

Barmaid Bette glows in silent conversation

her Lancashire Christmas revelry

incongruous in this summer heat

the ginger of the four cats

licks languorously at its Jellymeat

momentarily I stand aside

from How to Save Your Life’s little aphorisms

 - Jealousy is all the fun you think they had –

to contemplate a stopped life

and catch

the still frustration of another’s world



GREECE 1998

Athenians that were gods

sons and daughters of Apollo and Aphrodite

now sullenly

from two thousand years of conquest

to be made taxi drivers and surly desk clerks

reluctant votaries of the great god tourism



REFLECTIONS

At Christmas we rummage through the family photos

Tunnelling back to laugh at images of ourselves in earlier times

(“Mum, how could you make me wear that dress?”)

To retell our pasts

Each with our different memories, stories, perceptions

Of the past as we think it was or would like it to have been

And, as we turn the weathered leaves of old albums,

Watch ourselves grow, age, mature (would it were so!)

We reflect on who we were, who we are, and who we will become.



A BIRTHDAY DRAGON

Did you know that some dragons

Both of the watery and metallic kind

Like to live on glass bubbles

Indeed they thrive on them

Such dragons are the very preciousest

Of all the dragon species

For they have the world below them

At their fingertips

Like all dragons

They can be fiery and ferocious

Their spikes both sharp and brittle

But treated lovingly

These delicate fragile creatures

Are a source of fun and joy

Of passion and romance

Full of intimate mysteries

So here is a birthday dragon

Crafted with all the love and care

Of the glassmaker’s art

Fashioned in fiery flames

It rides serene

On its blue bubble

And here my dragon queen

Is a birthday wish

Crafted with all the love and care

Of the wordsmith’s art

That on our beautiful bubble

Our dragon fires

May warm our hearts

For many birthdays more.



“She Fumed… He Froze”

In the dawning hour they called to me

These children of yours

Spoke to me of the landscapes of love

Of consuming fires and frozen wastes

And I wept with them.

[Overnight in Rotorua after the opening of the Gill Gatfield exhibition Moving Mountains, 13^th April 2002]



THE TENNIS RACQUET

You were a stranger to my early years, and

As I walked with Mum and Liz to greet the bus

Your return from war-torn Africa long delayed 

I presumed you’d be a black man with frizzy hair.*

I carried your tennis racquet proudly home

Although it was almost as big as I

Peered in shy silence at this sickly man

Hot poultices slapped to back and chest

Nursed lovingly in my mother’s bed.**

Was it a tennis racquet moulded us

Confined intimacy to sports and games

Masking a crevasse we could not span?

Yet I’ve carried you close throughout my life

Minted my character through opposition

My image the obverse to your stamp.***

A good man my Dad, saintly in many ways

But stumbling fatherhood his bequest to me

And a battered racquet in a wooden press.

*I was a month short of three years old when I first saw my father in May 1943. My mother, big sister Elizabeth and I walked down from Mount Stuart, our rented cottage in Glen Devon, to the Yetts of Muckhart to meet him off the bus from Glasgow. In those childhood days of confident empire we played with golliwogs and collected labels from Robinson’s Marmalade to exchange for badges of that company’s golliwog mascot. Throughout her life my English grandmother spoke scathingly of ‘the blacks’. In my teens, I boldly, if despairingly, tried to correct her. “Not blacks,” I would say, “Negroes, granny, they’re Negroes.” By the sixties, Negro was no longer the politically correct nomenclature and ‘Black is Beautiful’ blossomed. Now Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean hold sway, though rumour has it that black is due for a rerun.

**My father contracted cerebral malaria in the Sudan, a British colony invaded by axis forces, and eventually made his way back to Scotland via South Africa. Weaning him from his quinine dependency precipitated a massive resurgence of malaria with rigors and 105-degree temperatures. Many times a day my mother, a trained nurse, would boil up a grey mess of clay, spread it onto squares of cloth, and rush into the bedroom to slap it on my father’s back and chest before it cooled. I presume it was to draw out the sweating from his fever. After a few weeks Elizabeth and I were packed off to my grandparents in Edinburgh while he recovered.

***The ancient stamp or die used to impress an image on the face of a coin was called a ‘charakter’ and analogies between coin, character and appearance are long-standing: e.g. ‘two-faced’. See Lynch, Deidre, 1998, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

SOPHIE’S FAN

What brought us together across the dramas of our lives

Remains random and mysterious

Lost in the mist of past journeyings.

Now, as companions in age,

Though our frailties make us tetchy,

We must cherish each other the more

Set aside tantrums over trivia, childish irritabilities,

That drain our emotions, exhaust our spirits,

For in such displays we hurt only ourselves

And if one is sick we are both the losers.

So cast off the anger and bitterness

They can but consume us both,

Forgo competitive striving against relatives, friends,

Set the children free to manage their own destinies.

As we face together, with equal composure,

Life’s sweet seductions and bitter grimaces

Even the gods will envy our ageless harmony.

ADRIFT, GOLDEN BAY, 20th January 2010

cut adrift, floating free
untethered from time’s untimely schedules and the anchors of duty,
succumb to nature’s tempos,
it’s times and tides, eddies and currents,
it’s vagabond winds and freshening breezes for mind and soul,
bask serene in the moment, the present,
no past, no future
a piece of flotsam washed by the sea of life

store those magic moments, short in time, long in memory,
cherish the hyper-reality of those Golden Bay days
before reberthing your life again

cut adrift, float free



A Waiting Day

It was a waiting day
I sat by the seashore
Keeping watch with a grey heron
Silent sentinel of the black rocks
On the sand a seagull with a limp
Scavenging picnic leftovers
Out at sea Louis Vuitton yachts
Stalled and calm, their listless crews
Waiting for that vagabond wind

It was a waiting day
Sunny and still
I walked barefoot on the beach
Feeling the freedom of the first sands of summer beneath my toes
Paddled along the water’s edge
Socks and cell phone tucked into the shoes hanging round my neck
Waiting for news of you

You came at the twilight
Of a waiting day
Cradled to your mother’s breast
Rocked gently in your father’s arms
Swaddled by family
Joy, love, euphoria and relief
At your safe deliveryAnd a breathless waiting world
Was released to life and laughter

[Birth of James, 10th October 2002]



GESTURES FROM THE HEART

there are times
soul-bleeding times
for simple healing
gestures from the heart

the innocence of a child
the smile of a loved one
unexpected gifts of friendship

Sophie's Fan
shyly given to the Honourable Mr John
a home-made Valentine's card
"Just so you know you're appreciated in this life"
a piece of pumice from Lake Taupo's shore

"When Taupo and Tauhara are no more then let my love die"



two rocks

one, wrapped in tissue,

a piece of rose quartz
sprinkled with gold and silver stars
a keepsake for the years
and a message inscribed:
Rose Quartz
gentle and soothing
good for fears
aches and pains
and healing broken hearts
(Failing that, it is a pretty slab of rock to stick on your desk)

the other
brought from the Mackinnon Pass
a track beyond my capability
reminder of what might have been
in old friendships rekindled



When I am done and gone

1.

Marooned in lazy-boy corner
Stirring from drifting memories of days gone by
I see you on the deck potting out a lemon tree

and

Time-travelled to another world
I catch a snapshot of your life
As it will be when I am gone.


2.

I care not to age like this
Frail and tremulous
But a shadow of the man I was
My body a burden to myself
Myself a burden to my love
Though bravely borne it seems
As she puts her life on pause
To resurrect when I am gone.