Time has washed our faces, our lives We bear its crags and gullies; Our eyes are bright then empty; Our step is joyous then halting And always it beats: it is the slow clock, The hours in a hospital room Waiting for the worst news; It is the rush of the sea – thrilling one…
Month: January 2016
Mothership & Country
I have been counting time in flags flapped ragged at the Daycare at the rate of two or three a year. The country disappears; then it’s mother ship; a provincial union franchise. You can drive by and see them waving, the toddlers, banging on the cut square perspex in the corrugated fence below the poles….
Symbolic Uneasy
The Dial’s swung round again: the Taupata autumns in berry clusters, tight bunches in flawless contrast, fire-orange in a roundness of green at the window, where the neighbour’s enormous grey cat climbs the step-ladder in like she lives here. Summer is three days gone, but the southern midday heat has weeks left, and if I…
east, the moon
east, the moon I. moon sleep on waters a wavelet breaks an hour till full-tide II. no-one ever woke in such a light a silver to close all eyes 1, 2 august 2015 eastern beach
pistol shot rap
pistol shot rap “Relationships have all been bad, mine have been like Verlaine and Rimbaud’s” from ‘You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go’ – Bob Dylan rimbaud a cool cat hot-headed as an ocean sun burning poems to breathe in their touch of opium watching rails for the slide of sun cursing the mother…
Earthenly
Earthenly, Curious and green, I feel these babbling brooks in my bones, They tickle and play on the nerves, A quiet hum permeating skin. What organised madness, An environment of the Pagans and I catch my breath at the sunset every time. I am forest after all.
Wolves
The wolves trailed through the black back door of the wintry forest Led by scent that gave true meaning it sealed their continued existence The score beating unequal temperament as they passed the river Faster a lack of moral conventions they were about to feed Their tracks danced amongst the night images Spoken with…
Sometimes
Sometimes the air is still; The light loses its clarity. This is such a day: immovable. It slouches; it is lazy and petulant, And ripe with indifference. Today it calls and calls. We are veined wet fallen leaves; We are rills of loss and regret And we can not explain: It is a sense of…
one day the poet will die…
One day the poet will die and the flowers on his grave wilt, unremembered. The bearer of human longing will falter under that weight and fall or wander one night, and reappear after dead years, a pale image home from the war. Some days I too would lie down after long walks and stare at…
to a fisherman & pukeko
to a fisherman & pukeko to a fisherman with his rod whipping back i thought to ask ‘what, friend, do you hope to catch late this last day of the year?’ the sun of this summer day just a cool glow now in grey going out on the west, the low tide still running deep…
Word
When I moved in to the large, narrow terrace house, a flatmate was midway through the East Sydney College Acting course, and, as a musician, he said, in the pale yellow walls of the red-floor kitchen, ‘the people are better in theatre’. I auditioned successfully at the next intake; and with a poem like this, based on…
from Rehab Walkabout
‘it’s the terror of knowing what this world is about.’ Queen, with David Bowie. Watching, the body feels human, but the mind won’t…