The Votive Angel by Moira Wairama

Thinking it’s the delivery pizza,

he opens the door

to The Votive Angel,

arrayed in slogan-splattered silks,

carrying her sword-sharp pen.

Silently she strides past him,

her silver boots crunching empty beer cans.

 “Apathetics,” she roars to the house at large,

“Arise and vote.”

The woman in the kitchen stirring soup looks up,

“Who for, dear?” she inquires amiably.

“Think,” expectorates the angel,

her spittle splattering the bubbling soup.

Around the bathroom door appears

a freshly painted mannequin’s mask.

 “I like the one that always smiling,” she beams.

The spin doctors hiding in the shit house high–five each other.

From the darkest corner of the room

the pin-pointed pupil yawns widely.

“No point voting, can’t trust fuckin’ politicians,

come the revolution I’ll be out there,” he mumbles.

Seizing his carefully groomed dreadlocks,

The Votive Angel swings him ceiling high

to drop and fall beneath a wall-sized TV screen.

Where images of teeth white infomercial beauties

are suddenly replaced

by battered, bleeding protesters

struggling against a tide of helmeted batons

fiercely fighting for the freedom

to vote.

“Bitch,” snarls the patched one threateningly

As he strains to rise from his proverbial crouch

“My fucking right not to.”

Screeching in fury,

the angel draws her politically incorrect whip

and drives all before her out

into the street where others gather in amusement.

“Vote, you Apathetics,” she screams distraught,

her silver boots stamping on unyielding asphalt.

“Vote,” she banshee wails to the indifferent crowd,  

her stirring words swallowed by a silent majority.

She watches grim-faced as people  

scuttle back inside to watch American Idol

while others follow sheep-like the sharp-suited man

who suddenly appears to leads them to the nearest pub.

“I’m paying,” he calls back cheerfully.

The Votive Angel shrugs her shoulders in defeat,

unsettling her wings from which feathers fall.

She takes off her silver boots

and bare-footed walks after the promise of free drinks.

Posted with permission from Moira Wairama. 
Tuesday poem editor this week: Andrew M. Bell

Moira performing in Scary Sagas

MOIRA WAIRAMA is a Wellington storyteller specializing in bi-lingual tellings of traditional legends, an award-winning writer, a poet and a teacher. With her partner, Tony Hopkins, she is co-founder of Baggage Co-op, which has produced a number of award-winning shows including Po@rt, the art of Poetry, Questions and Te Kauta (all written by Moira) and most recently Te Haerenga, a journey of identity which toured to the United Kingdom in 2012. She has also written a number of radio dramas.

Moira was coordinator of the Hutt Valley Angus Inn Poets Pub for over a decade and is herself a performance poet with work in a number of anthologies, including works for children. She writes for children in both English and Maori and has won several awards for her books The Puppet Box and The Taniwha of Wellington Harbour.  Currently she is working on a picture book for women with artist Linda Tilyard and trying to make friends, rather unsuccessfully, with the spiny-backed, foul-breathed dragon of technology. 

I first met Moira through the Wellington theatre scene in the mid-1990s. I knew Moira first as a performer and a storyteller. Then I became well-acquainted with Moira's partner, Tony, when he and I were cast to perform in a production of Driving Miss Daisy. Tony, who is African-American, was to play the part of the chauffeur, made famous in the film version by Morgan Freeman. Unfortunately, after much rehearsal, the production was abandoned because the director couldn't raise the funding. That's theatre for you.

Later, I saw a powerful production of Moira's play, Questions, a play about youth suicide inspired by real-life events. The play went on to be adapted for and screened on television with a television panel discussion following the screening.

So, like Shrek's metaphor about the onion in the first Shrek movie, I witnessed the various layers of Moira's creative life peeled away. Then she invited me to read at the Angus Inn Poets Pub in Lower Hutt where I became a semi-regular reader and audience member.

Moira is a creative force to be reckoned with and a lovely person as well. She has a quirky, dry sense of humour which comes through in this poem which should resonate with all Kiwis in this election year. Please follow the advice of the poem, as I'm sure all erudite Tuesday Poets already do, and exercise your democratic right.

This week's editor,  Andrew M. Bell, writes poetry, short fiction, plays, screenplays and non-fiction. His work has been published and broadcast in New Zealand/Aotearoa, Australia, England, Israel and USA. His most recent publications are Aotearoa Sunrise, a short story collection, and Clawed Rains, a poetry collection. Andrew lives in Christchurch with his wife and two sons and loves to surf.

From Bird Murder by Stefanie Lash

Tusk

Tusk was settled by rogue miners.
They went too far up-creek, there was no gold, they were lost.
They found instead the coloured stones.

The women are most industrious in tusk
and the children hop from house to house.
Perhaps because of the minerality of the River tusk

children’s hair will colour as they age.
Purple is the predominant hue; some boys turn green.
The huge prismatic slabs dominate industry:

tiling, tinted tonics prepared from the glacial flour,
some paper, an abundance of silkworms nearby.
From the terraced town the sea is very visible,

but visitors don’t come here. The jetty isn’t long enough
for pleasure boats and the blue mountains hug
and nest them so closely.


Passerine

I am sent to work on my impossible bottle.
I am sent to the train to board and alight, board and alight,
until a certain time has passed.

Swan fat for our faces is delivered in ice boxes.
On school days I count the windows of the manse
then count them again.

Wring, wring. Press my knees dry.
I must not look behind any statue.
I wear the whale in between each rib.

When I grow up I will learn to drive
and I’ll drive back and forth across the country
without ever needing petrol.

My name is Passerine and
I sigh into a man’s hat up in the attic.
J is for Juno, whispering down my telescope.


Iridescence

For feathers to iridesce
the molecular structure
is like a prism;

or air pockets retained in the feather
scatter light uniformly;
for feathers to be black,

melanin is present,
a strengthening agent.
But in the white feather – the white feather.

Pearls dissolved in vinegar.
Rinsed in the milk bath.
Only exposed to moonlight.

Have you seen a bird’s skull
aerially
like a droplet of bone frozen.


Posted with permission from Stefanie Lash and Mākaro Press. Soon to be published in Bird Murder.
Tuesday poem editor this week: Helen Rickerby

Stefanie Lash is a poet and archivist who lives in Aro Valley, Wellington. Her poems have appeared in journals including Sport, Takahē and Turbine. Bird Murder is her first book.


I couldn't resist. I know it's cheating, but it's Tuesday Poems this week rather than a Tuesday Poem because I couldn't resist sharing three of the poems from Bird Murder, Stefanie Lash's debut collection of poetry, which is going to be launched next week (details below). Bird Murder is one of the three books in the Hoopla poetry series, to be very soon published by Mākaro Press (along with Heart Absolutely I Can by Michael Harlow and my own collection, Cinema).

This is the official blurb for the book:

An albino huia, a stranger in the attic and a pink-haired woman ... Bird Murder is a gothic murder mystery telling of the demise of a ruined banker, set in the not-quite fictional town of Tusk.

At the heart of the story is the sacred bird, the huia: its beauty, curiosity and ‘fluted conversation’, and the consequences of its slaughter by early settlers.

As evening falls and Mr Cockatrice and his wife prepare for a party, questions surface. Are the gimlet-eyed creatures in the bird room capable of revenge? Is the stranger perching in the attic more than he seems? Or is the temptation of a fine head of cherry’d hair reason enough to murder?

 

I was lucky enough to get to get a pre-publication read of Bird Murder, and gosh it's good. I've never read anything quite like it. It's sort of a 'verse novel', as they call them in Australia, in that it tells a story over the course of the book, but it's so much more than that. The verse novels I've read have, it seems to me, sacrificed the poetry for the story, losing the richness of the language and ideas and layering of meaning. But that is so not true of the poems in Bird Murder, where the language is sparkly and playful, and so much is going on under the surface.

Although it is made up of poems in the same strict form - five stanzas of three lines each - there is such variety in this book. (Hence my desire to share more than one of the poems.) The styles and tones of the poems vary, and line lengths go from a single word to ones that stretch right across the page. The sum of the parts adds up to a unique collection that is by turns magical, grim, humorous, mysterious, strange and very satisfying.

It is also quite educational. You'll learn a lot about huia and other birds - along with the fiction there is a lot of fact, as evidenced by the notes and references at the end.

As I said, Bird Murder, along with Heart Absolutely I Can by Michael Harlow, and Cinema by me, is going to be launched next week, and you're invited. It's also a celebration of Mākaro Press's first year in the publishing business, and the end of Writers Week. So, Thursday 13 March (that's next week!), 5.30, Blondini's (the cafe at the Embassy Theatre), Wellington. Hope to see you there!


This week's editor, Helen Rickerby, has published two-and-a-half books of poetry, and her new collection, Cinema, will be published by Mākaro Press next week. She runs Seraph Press, a boutique publishing company with a growing reputation for publishing high-quality poetry books, and she is co-managing editor of JAAM literary journal. She blogs irregularly at wingedink.blogspot.com and has a day job as a web editor.

And do check out some of the other Tuesday Poems that you'll find in the sidebar to the left.

Iambic pentameter by Patricia Sykes

I watch myself     how I use my voice     how
much I give away     rebellion weighs
against obedience     prayer against fantasy
rote against the thrill of words that lately arrive

It was hearing a girl recite Ode to a Cabbage
that made me want to write verse myself
I hide my poems like hoarded love
the taste of secrecy is delicious (Nun-

the-Big-Irish gives the girl curry
when she catches her kissing my cheek)
now Mother-of-the-Blackboard 
proving with chalk that poetry has feet    

ˇ/ ˇ/ ˇ/ ˇ/ ˇ/

If a thing is not prayer why must it be sacrilege?
We are children of rhythm as well as of God
I am learning body worship from a girl who
walks beautifully     where else but here

could I rejoice such things?     Father,
are you listening? I'm your little exile no more
You would not know me     I am metric now
My feet are my own     how you will miss me

Posted with permission from Patricia Sykes. From: The Abbotsford Mysteries, Spinifex Press, 2011
TP editor this week: Catherine Bateson.

The Abbotsford Mysteries is a collection of poems which give voice to the complex and varied experiences of girls housed in the Abbotsford convent. As Skyes notes in her acknowledgements, the convent was divided into three 'classes' - St Jospeh's (the orphanage), St Mary's (for country girls and later for migrant girls) and the Sacred Heart (for 'wayward girls' and older women). The stories of these women, gleaned from interviews Sykes conducted with over seventy ex-residents, weave through this powerful collection. But it is also a personal narrative as Sykes and her sisters were placed in the convent after the death of their mother. The poems are vivid, intense and fierce and the language moves easily between wry intimacy and lyrical evocation borrowing its register and intensity from liturgy. You can read another poem from this collection here.

Patricia Sykes is a Melbourne-based poet and librettist. Her poems have won various prestigious Australian prizes including the Newcastle Poetry Prize. She has collaborated with Australian composer Liza Lim to create Mother Tongue, a piece for soprano and 15 instruments, and The Navigator, a chamber opera. These works have been performed both in Australia and in festivals overseas, including the Huddersfield International Contemporary Music Festival, the Festival d'Automne and the Chekhov Theatre Festival. Her two previous poetry collections, Wire Dancing and Modewarre - home ground, were both published by Spinifex Press.  

The Abbotsford Convent Foundation is now a not-for-profit organisation committed to fostering creativity, culture and learning. As well as regular events such as festivals, conferences and art and craft markets, over 100 artist studios are housed there.

*

Hub Editor: Catherine Bateson is a poet and writer for children and young adults. She is currently working on a novel based on her time in Paris, on an Australia Council for the Arts funded residency programme. Her most recent poetry collection, Marriage for Beginners, was published by John Leonard Press. 


Don't forget to check out the other Tuesday Poets via the sidebar - an inspirational start to the week!

Uncoupling by Jac Jenkins

Ice clasps its thorny cloak with filigreed

brittle lace against my breast

bone. The pin sticks my skin when I inhale.

I stay close to his mouth;

his heat breathes an early thaw

as Winter opens its teeth on my throat.

Spring stitches my scabs to scars, my scars

to silver. I am bare beneath bridal lace

and veil. When I inhale, his hands

clasp me like whalebone; I stay close

to the looking glass so I can see

his beaten knuckles.

Summer loosens my stays. I am

bare and bridled on the burning ground.

My tongue is desert when I inhale. He

is dry bone in the sand, stacked

like pyred sticks. I stay close to his clacking

hands. A loop of gold spins on his ring finger.

Autumn leaves my flesh for the carrion-

eaters. He is dry sand scouring my bones.

I am inhaled by the wind, breathed

out over water, looping and spinning,

close to the opening throat

of the ocean.

Dedicated to Christine de Pizan,

Europe's first feminist

Posted with permission from Jac Jenkins. First published 2013 in Takahē.
TP editor this week: Michelle Elvy

I have known the poet Jac Jenkins since I moved to Northland back in 2009. We've been in poetry groups together and shared flash fiction. Last year we even put our heads together when we judged the 2013 Northland Flash Fiction Competition, hosted by Whangarei Libraries. As a writer of both flash and poetry, Jac knows how to create impact with economy. I admire that most about her writing: nothing ever drags; her poetry catches you from the opening line and takes you by surprise.

And Jac has enjoyed increasing recognition for both poetry and prose in the last couple years, most recently winning the 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition with the poem I posted today. Even better than me writing about Jac's winning poem, 'Uncoupling', I leave it to judge Joanna Preston, who wrote:

 The winning poem, “Uncoupling” by Jac Jenkins, is one I tried to resist, but couldn’t. I was wary of how many of my own personal preferences it seemed to tick – startlingly good images? Check. Vaguely gothic/medieval/fantastical feel to it? Check. As full of song as a Welsh football stadium? Check. (Wish like heck I’d written it myself? Check.) Even now I can’t tell you what it’s about, except by quoting it back verbatim – to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, it ‘resists the intelligence almost successfully’. But I could pull almost any line at random and offer it as an example of lovely workmanship. The way words and images return and modulate – from breast bone to whalebone to dry bones to my bones, from brittle lace to bridal lace to bare and bridled. Intoxicating sounds, and repeated phrases that shift their meaning as they flicker through the poem. A worthy winner, and a poem that still makes me catch my breath. I am envious and in awe. 

You can read all of Joanna Preston's comments in the full 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition Judge's Report here.

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Jac Jenkins is a poet and flash fiction writer from rural Whangarei. She works as a librarian but is looking forward to a three-month writing sabbatical in Australia late in 2014, hopefully in a location that challenges her with new experiences and allows her doctor-partner, Alistair, to practise medicine in a different context. Jac’s writing has found its way into the Northern Advocate, Flash Frontier and Take Flight, and she has recently celebrated winning the 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition and also enjoyed success in the Northwrite Collaboration Competition with Alistair. She was also awarded a NZ Society of Authors poetry mentorship in 2012, during which she worked closely with poet Sue Wootton. 

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Michelle Elvy lives and works as an editor and manuscript assessor based in the Bay of Islands but is travelling this year in Indonesia. She edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Blue Five Notebook. Her poetry and prose can be found in print and online, most recently or forthcoming in Poets & Artists, Takahē, 2014: A Year in Stories (Pure Slush) and Eastbourne: An Anthology (Makaro Press). A member of the NZ Association of Manuscript Assessors, Michelle can be found at michelleelvy.com, and her Tuesday Poem posts can be found at her blog, Glow Worm. 

* When you've got to grips with Uncoupling, please check out the other Tuesday Poets in the blog sidebar. Riches there. 

Bogong Moth by Joe Dolce

A Bogong moth

darts out of darkness
to seize fire -
it’s burned away its tarsi,
yet continues to swoop,
kiss, careen, sizzle,
fluttering and candle-banging
like fawn-crazed Nijinski.

I look up from my book

accepting the immortal,
fatal dance
of life and light,
like Icarus’s father
resigned to watch
his flying boy
hurl against brilliance.

When you were a baby

night crying,
often the only way
to pacify you
was to bundle you
in your satin blanket
and walk along
Seventh Avenue.

The percussion of traffic noise,

street lamps, flashing head
and tail lights,
opened your brown eyes wide.
You were intoxicated
and I soon lost you to sleep . . .

O my little son, cocooned there

in that middle-aged man
who hasn’t spoken to me
for years –

what flickering galaxies

do you fling yourself against now
for sleep,
far beyond my reach?

posted with permission from Joe Dolce
editor: Jennifer Compton

Now Joe Dolce is probably most well known for 'that song': Shaddap You Face! And I do play a game of Joe Dolce sightings around the place — a bus driver in Kingsville singing the refrain —and in a UK cop show! Amazing. But now Joe, who lives in Melbourne, has turned his hand to poetry and essays, with frequent appearances at readings and festivals, and in respected literary journals. Anything more you want to know about him, check out his website. The link is below.  

http://www.joedolce.net/

P.S. I am not absolutely sure what a tarsi is but I can guess.

A bogong moth is a big old night flying creature that arrives in hordes when the weather is right. It is supposed to be good eating.

This week's editor is Jennifer Compton, a poet and playwright who also writes prose. She was born in New Zealand but, like Joe, is now a resident of Melbourne. Most recently she won the Newcastle Poetry Prize for her poem Now You Shall Know. In this pic she is open miking in Westword — at the Dancing Dog in Footscray. Pic taken by Michael Reynolds (thanks Michael) who has stolen all the local poets' souls and keeps them in his machine LOL. 

When you've got to grips with Joe Dolce and Bogong moths, do check out the other Tuesday Poets in the sidebar. Great to have you drop by! 

Eastbourne by Helen Jacobs

1
It is to the island
and the coastlands
that the shifting light
tethers on a fluid line
weaving water and sand
and rock.

The point of going away
is always to come back –
thrice deny, and you
come back

to the shells of your sandheaps,
allow that there could be
an old spirit or two
or simply an old love affair
with the harbour playing you in.


2

Climbing to the houses
you look down to where
yachts gather, to the path
of the ferries, to all
the usual traffic on the rim,
and you are caught in
the particular pattern
of this moment’s water movement,
this wind flurry, this shadow
darkening green to grey,
and you cannot leave it
because the evening will be
different, and tomorrow will be
different, and the sky has
so many ways of passing before
you, and you cannot gather
all this into imagination so
you must stay.


3

The wide open coast lends itself
to the wind, moods of high spray
over the scrub and frayed flax.
You walk here with your ears wool-
covered, hands in deep pockets,
crouch into a rock or low bush
with your sandwiches.

But on the days of endless blue
there are three white lighthouses
to choose from, the sea a slow swell,
a fishing boat sitting distant,
and you walk to one lighthouse or
the other over sand, clay, rock,
rhythm your steps to a remote clarity
that you can only paint –
or stare at;
in the stillness of the sun
count seven seals, or the houses
on the other shore, and take home one
fingernail-sized shell to code it all,
this question of where the heart lies.

1999
posted with the poet's permission

Editor: Mary McCallum 

Not long before Christmas last year, the people of Eastbourne (NZ) packed out local bookshop Rona Gallery to launch Eastbourne : an anthology (Mākaro Press). The woman launching the book was former mayor  Elaine Jakobsson who writes as poet Helen Jacobs. Her poems 'bookend' the 300 page book, and Elaine had flown north from Christchurch especially to be there. 

After Elaine's launch speech, there were readings from the book, but the last to read was Elaine herself, and Eastbourne is the poem she read. For all who live here it is a taonga — a gift — something to return to as much as the place itself — and the perfect ending to this book of place. 

I speak of Eastbourne with such warmth because I am the publisher at new press, Mākaro, and one of the editors along with Anne Manchester and Maggie Rainey-Smith. Helen Jacobs (now in her 80s) was one of our wonderful finds. The collection of writing — poetry, fiction and creative memoir by 96 different authors — and drawings by local artists, evoke Eastbourne of the imagination, taking readers into the place bay by bay, from Point Howard to Pencarrow. There is classic writing by writers like Katherine Mansfield and Robin Hyde, high profile contemporary writers like Steve Braunias and Lloyd Jones, and fresh new writing from talented locals and visitors like Avi Duckor-Jones and Sarah Laing. 

Elaine Jacobsson was born in Patea in 1929. She came to live in Lowry Bay in 1954, and stayed in  Eastbourne for 36 years. Following an involvement in community activities and environmental issues she was elected Mayor of Eastbourne in 1980, and appointed to the Planning Tribunal in 1986. Since 1984. she has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being DRIED FIGS (2012). 

Elaine/Helen's work has been published in many magazines and anthologies including ‘Yellow Pencils’ 1988, ‘Oxford Anthology of Love Poems’ 2000, ‘Essential NZ Poems’ 2001, ‘My Garden, My Paradise’ 2003, ‘This Earth’s deep Breathing’ 2007, ‘Our Own Kind’ 2009 and in numerous Canterbury anthologies. She retired to Christchurch in 1994 where she has been active in the poetry community and the Canterbury Poets Collective. Visit her at helenjacobspoetry.wordpress.com. 

What a pleasure it was meeting Elaine! And huge thanks to Robyn Cooper who looked after her so wonderfully when she came for the launch. 

One of the joys on working on Eastbourne for us editors was the joy of finding writers from the past life of the community we hadn't expected or known much about, and giving their work more time in the sun. Part of Elaine's speech at the launch of Eastbourne is worth recalling for its acknowledgement of this:

By casting the net generously to gather in retrospective writers as well as current, prose writers of every category as well as poets, this book will have a wide and lasting appeal, and will convey something of the complex nature of writers within the same environment, and something of their attachment to living here, something of the nurse bed of their inspiration. 

And it achieves more. In this age where all is floating in a cloud, dispersed in a sea of twitter, it brings together and gives anchorage to the writers — a tangible centring. 

This is our first post of 2014, at another place where writers and readers can be centred, and find anchorage. Do join us here at Tuesday Poem every Tuesday to meet another poet and poem. In the sidebar, 30 Tuesday Poets post a Tuesday Poem of their own each week — either by themselves or a poet they admire. Check it out.