Category Archives: tuesday poem

Tuesday Poem: “Morning with my grandmother” by Ingrid Horrocks

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Morning with my grandmother

1996

She sat at the foldout table
on the back deck
lipstick on
playing Patience
with whisky on ice.

Late morning she walked
down the grassy lakefront
spiked
with prickles, and, at a distance,
lit a sly cigarette.

She hardly used the car
or went far from the house,

but I’d heard
that my grandmother learnt to drive
from an American Marine:

Twenty-one, married,
she danced all night, then
borrowed a car to get her sailor
back to port, letting him guide her hands.
Together they turned and swung.

Later she drove alone,
pressing the accelerator with
wonder, careering magnificently
along the harbour’s edge
under the stars.

Early 1980s

The Official Version

Once, one of the Marines
your Gran knew
during the War
visited Auckland.

There was a fat woman
in the lift whom
your grandfather joked
he’d introduce in her place.

Perhaps
she rode the lift to meet him,
part of a phalanx -
husband, son, and grandson
at the points.

She straightened her slacks,
touched her newly-set hair,
stroked her husband’s arm
and took his hand.

Together, all four stepped
into the lobby to meet
her old driving instructor,
her Marine.

At first
she saw only a stranger -
thick-necked, thin-haired, in a dark suit
that spoke success while he talked
too loudly for the room.

But then, the way his blue eyes drove
over her searching for the girl
she’d been. Even now, she saw
how easy desertion would be.

And maybe
in that instand my grandfather
moved forward to shake
the hand of the man who had
known his wife in the war.

He didn’t thank the visitor
for the silk stockings.
Once he wouldn’t
have thanked this man for anything,

except, perhaps, in exchange
for the intrigue in his wife’s eyes
when he arrived home with photos
- in uniform, a girl on each arm in Trieste.

And just possibly
as the American reached out,
ruffled the grandson’s black hair,
and said, ‘Here’s a little Marine,’
my grandfather was hit

with doubt.
The boy
retreating into his father’s laugh
could have been anyone’s

till he reached up to take
my grandfather’s dry hand,
as if to say, I am
here, ours, us, yours, hers.

Then
for just long enough she too turned
from the man who had taught her to drive,
from the husband who left and returned,
to the waiting boy
who would one day be twenty-one.

“Morning with my grandmother” is from Ingrid Horrocks’ book, Mapping the Distance (VUP). I wanted to share the poem because, for me, it captures the complexity of wartime relationships. The poet’s story remindes me of stories that I heard about my own grandparents. I especially enjoy the way the poem jumps through time, and the idea that the grandson will “one day be twenty-one,” which makes me think about the universal experience of young love.

Ingrid Horrocks has has also written a chapbook of poems, Natsukaashi (1998) and Travelling With Augusta (2003), which brings together research and personal writing. She has a PhD from Princeton University, and lives in Wellington where she writes and teaches at Massey University.

For other Tuesday Poems check out the hub.

Tuesday Poem: “all the love poems” by Bill Nelson

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love_poemsBill Nelson won the Biggs Poetry prize for best poetry portfolio at the IIML in 2009. His writing has appeared in Hue & Cry, Sport, The Lumière Reader, Blackmail Press, 4th Floor, and Swamp. He has also guest edited at Turbine and Blackmail Press.

Bill’s poetry has featured as the Tuesday Poem on my blog twice before with “Vocal” and “Against Boredom”. As you may be able to guess, I’m a fan of his work. A thread I notice running through Bill’s work – which can also be said for “all the love poems” – is the way he makes the reader question something they take for granted. Even though “all the love poems” seems to make fun of other love poems, the final image where the speaker leaves the “love poem \ outside \ for the rain to clothe” suggests that the poet also feels sentimental. The poet won’t rest in the image too long, though, and immediately undercuts it with the instruction about strawberries. For me, I end up thinking about whether my own offerings of love are boring and cliche, or as clever as Bill’s poem.

For more Tuesday poems check out the hub.

Tuesday Poem: “For Sheep” by Therese Lloyd

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For Sheep

I have to hold my fists loose
like I’m holding a telescope
and peer down the tunnel
of my hands
to the tiny crooked shape at the end
This is the only way I can tell ‘colour’
I have to really think about it and then
through the invisible cables that connect me
to my friend who lives far away
I say, yes, at this moment
the sea is blue

In your kitchen, through one window a row of mountains
and turning to look out the opposite window
sheep, paddock and forest beyond

This is where you live now and there is something
of the Rapunzel in it except that you can not be saved
because there’s nothing wrong

Until I visited you I had never fed a sheep from my hands before
That sheep with her crazy yellow eyes
glaring in ancestral suspicion
snuffled up my handful of biscuits
with her tiny child sized teeth
and as a reward, let me touch her dirty wool

The warmth from her mouth
and the nervy movement of her lips
merely effects produced by my pineal gland
perhaps, and the crusted dirt on her wool
may have been velvet or silk under someone else’s hand
This is what happens when we touch
a series of synaptic transmissions that produce
action/s and emotion/s
We construct our worlds in this way
make them up continuously, piece by piece
putting them together to suit our needs
And now after all this time
we say, yes, we have developed
excellent imaginations

Therese Lloyd lives in Paekakariki with her husband, poet Lee Posna. Her first full length poetry book Other Animals is due out with VUP in March 2013.

Tuesday Poem: “Voices” by Sarah Jane Barnett

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Voices

At the beginning of my PhD I wrote a series of short brick-shaped poems. I wanted to stencil them on bare walls around Wellington, and based each on a particular location. I still would like to publicly display the poems, but it takes time to make stencils etc., so the project is down the bottom of my ‘to do’ list (at the top I have care for child, shower, write, and eat).  This particular poem came from seeing someone collapsed in Cuba Mall — or at least an imagined event where someone collapsed. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference!

Tuesday Poem: “Between the lines” by Rachel Bush

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Between the lines

My first diary squashed a whole week
into two pages. I resisted,
wrote twice between each line and sometimes,
because I was fourteen and wanted
to be kissed, and because Mr Cave,
Mr St John, Mr Botting and
Mr Curran taught me and because
there as Bible Class on Mondays, and
because I rode my bike fast downhill
to Turuturu Mokai and my
best friends were Pam and Annette, and
our parents didn’t know we had the
answers, and because we could play
tennis on the Methodist courts, and
because the full circle of my dress
rose round me when I turned, and because
our bikes urged themselves to Nowell’s Lake
and Normanby, and because Patea
boys had written BERTHA in the dust
on their bus and waved to us, I had
too much to say and turned the pages
sideways, cross hatched, made a knitted script
that cannot be unravelled one stitch
then the next and wound into a ball.
Safe like that, committed but secret,
I have my own hieroglyphs, my own
small-town Rosetta stone.

“Between the lines” is from Rachel Bush’s most recent collection, Nice Pretty Things (VUP, 2011), and discovering her writing has been a revelation for me. It’s nice to know that I can still stumble across New Zealand writers who I’ve never read and fall in love with their writing. I’ve had the book for about a year, but the reason it had remained unread was because I found the cover uninspiring (sorry VUP!). I am sure there is a lesson in there for me.

For me, “Between the lines” captures the excitement and urgency of adolescence. I kept diaries–which will be buried with me–as a teenager, and as the poem says, “I had / too much to say” to use the lines. When I read the poem aloud to myself, I hear Bush’s many wonderful rhymes that aren’t obvious at first glance. The rhyme of the last two lines makes me want to do a little fist punch in the air!

For other Tuesday Poems check out the hub.

Tuesday Poem: “walking on wishbone” by Kerrin P. Sharpe

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walking on wishbone

the fruiterer
young ming and sons
yun and fong
sit on apple boxes
drinking the thin

soup of morning
their jackets
so slim
you can push
rice through

my mother
and her fishbone needle
gather peacock lanterns
blackbird wings
the loose change

of clocks
for gusset linings
knowing they will be
outside a long time

One of my father’s interests is the gold rush in New Zealand. When I was a child, my family and I tramped into the bush to dig over the abandoned sites of old gold mines (I have to say, I did not go willingly!). My father had quite an interest in the Chinese miners who were part of the Otago gold rush, and Kerrin P. Sharpe’s poem brings them to mind.

The poem is from Sharpe’s collection, Three Days in a Wishing Well (2012, VUP). The collection itself feels like a series of wishes–for flight, for understanding of our histories, and for a world of imagination. For me, the first six lines of this poem evoke the rhythm of stitching, as Sharpe’s line breaks rock you back and forth. If you’ve got a thing for a good line break–which I do–then Sharpe’s poetry is one to read.

For other Tuesday Poems check out the hub.

Tuesday Baby

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Emily Dickinson said, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” Sam is leaving me little time for anything else at the moment, even posting a Tuesday Poem. So instead you get a picture of my Tuesday baby (who really is now a Tuesday toddler), striding off to find some mischief.

Tuesday Poem: “Blue Heart” by Sarah Jane Barnett

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Blue Heart

The boy enters the whale heart. He finds his way.
His hands slide down the peachy aorta, his body
swallowed into the central chamber. My face pushes
after him because it’s just fibre and glass, and he’s
my first child, on his knees, his back to me. His hands
perform their work of play along a smooth ridge of cartilage
like a cardiac surgeon. Interpretations of the “whale” fall
into three categories: The whale is real and my son
lives in her heart. Or the whale is the dream
I have for my son. Or the whale is an allegory
that should not be taken to heart. Some things take time
to understand. Last time we visited my grandmother
I knew she would die before I saw her again.
She’d been having regular blood transfusions—
pulsing circles of bright red tubing—which helped
for a few weeks before another fall, after which she’d lie
one cheek on the carpet. My son sat on her lap and put his hand
in her mouth. She played at biting his fingers, her grey
dentures clacking together, and he squealed and pointed,
and then pointed to the fireplace and then pointed to the window
where a dried floral arrangement had sat for twenty years.
Everything was there for him. She took his pointing finger
between the soft pads her lips. How do you enter
the biggest heart? Do you say that it weighs up to fifteen
hundred pounds? The largest heart is like a compacted volvo!
Maybe you must imagine it beating inside you? My son
has a strong heart. I heard it in the early hours this morning.
The water is milky in his bath; his skin damp even
after a warm towel. His cheeks have flared the colour of summer
plums because his teeth are cutting through. He holds me
in his slow working mouth. Even in sleep he knows how to suckle.

For this Tuesday, I thought I’d post one of my own poems. It’s part of the collection for my PhD, so still a work in progress.

For more Tuesday Poems check out the hub.

Tuesday Poem: “The Confident Troubador” by Bill Manhire

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The Confident Troubador

I.
He praises her eyes.
He praises her lips.

He imagines her pale, experimental breasts.

He calls for his guitar,
for other men with drums.

He calls for some small, unvarnished instrument.

2.
And oh her life is monotonous.
In her father’s house the corridors
are swarming with moths and profit

while down at the river’s edge
the man is building
his armful of flowers.

Oh he is singing again.

But he cannot sing in tune.
She will hide in her sister’s room!

But now he is singing again.

‘The Confident Troubador’ is from Bill Manhire’s collection, Lifted. I managed to get my hands on a preloved copy a few months ago, and this was one of my favourite poems form the collection. There is nothing like his understated humour. VUP have just put out a volume of Manhire’s selected poems so that’s something to get my hands on.

For other Tuesday Poems check out the hub.