No time like the '80s/ No future by Airini Beautrais

from Dear Neil Roberts

In 1989, my dad gets knocked off his motorbike.
He gets a court summons, to testify against the driver.
Because she is brown, and my dad has decided
the justice system is racist, he rips up the summons.

(A few weeks earlier, a housebreaker (brown)
who happened to be a father of six,
was shot dead by a neighbour (white)
who was let off).

Dad rips up his summons on the Holmes show.
It is very exciting. Reporters come to our house.
I put on my best hair-tie, the one with a white gauze flower,
and my siblings and I roll around the floor on camera.

After it screens, the phone calls start.
‘I’m going to drop a bomb on your house,’
a weirdo tells my mother.
And another weirdo, or possibly the same one

is going to rape, torture and murder
my sister and I (aged four and six).
Like Holmes used to say,
‘Those were our people today.’

It is the end of a dark decade. One that began
with sport and politics shouldn’t mix
with the Red Squad, chanting:
Root more, eat more, drink more piss.

Ronald Reagan was thinking neutron. It was illegal
for men to make love to each other. American warships
were being officially welcomed in our harbours,
and unofficially welcomed by rabble rousers

my parents included, paddling out in kayak
and mullet boat. They lived their lives
as if there wasn’t a madman on the trigger
although there was – in fact, there were several.

The Russians flying jets into British airspace,
and the British flying theirs in circles around them,
like some bizarre avian courtship, a dance of death.
‘You’d seen films about Hiroshima,’ my dad says,

‘100 000 people being incinerated.’ Did you think
nuclear war was a definite possibility? ‘Oh, shit yes.
And you’d ask yourself, what would you do, if they bombed Auckland?
Would you run away, or run towards it?’

What went through Reagan’s head, as he shifted
from butt-cheek to butt-cheek? Or Thatcher’s? Brezhnev’s?
We’ll never know. My mother hangs up the phone.
My father stops riding a motorbike. They live their lives.

We aren’t allowed water pistols. They give us balloons
which read ‘I want to grow up not blow up.’
We sew a patchwork peace flag,
‘Tutira mai nga iwi.’

In 1990, on Hiroshima Day, we dig a hole in the sand,
put a kauri tree in. We throw some flowers,
like there aren’t new wars unfolding,
although there are.

Editor: Helen Rickerby

I came upon this poem in the latest issue of JAAM, which is only just back from the printers. I had a sneak preview while proofreading the issue, and this poem is one of my favourite in the issue. It resonates with me especially because I remember that time. I'm a little older than Airini, and so presumably remember more of the 1980s, but I very much recognise the things she's saying. The madmen with their fingers on the triggers - the constant threat of nuclear war.

I love this poem, not only for its story, its narrative, but also for the poemness of it. The difference the line breaks make, the spare intensity of the language. I also love the hope. I'm a sucker for hope. In the midst of the 'dark decade' her parents have been bringing up children, living their lives, planting trees.

Airini says of this poem: 'In writing a long poem in response to anarchist bomber Neil Roberts, I kept coming back to the characterisation of the 1980s as a time of impending human doom. The incidents related in this poem are taken from my own life, and in relating these I hoped to reflect a sliver of New Zealand society at the time. My parents were involved in the 1981 anti-tour protests, and clearly the scars from that time hadn't faded by the end of the decade. I was interested in the way my parents integrated child-rearing and political activism. I don't know how I would explain to a small child what "I want to grow up not blow up" means.'

The theme of JAAM 31 is 'the 2013 issue'. Contributors were asked to think about what the 2013 issues are. Many of the pieces that have made it into the pages are, like this poem, about that past, and learning from the past. We humans don't always seem that good at learning from the past.

Airini (and Felix)

Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Secret Heart and Western Line, both published by Victoria University Press. She is currently working on a PhD in creative writing, on the subject of narrative poetry. 'No time like the ‘80s/ No future' is from a long narrative poem, Dear Neil Roberts, written during 2012, reflecting on an incident that happened 30 years earlier, around the time the author was born. Neil was a 22-year-old punk anarchist who blew himself up outside Wairere House, Whanganui, the building which housed the police computer system. It is believed that Neil’s act was a symbolic protest against the growing authority of the state and its intrusion into the lives of ordinary people.

This week's editor is Helen Rickerby, whose new poetry collection, Cinema, will be published by Makaro Press early next year. Her previous two-and-a-half poetry collections are My Iron Spine (HeadworX, 2008) and Abstract Internal Furniture (HeadworX, 2001), and her poem sequence Heading North, which was  published in a hand-bound hardback edition by Kilmog Press in 2010. She runs Seraph Press, a boutique publishing company that has 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.

Do check out some of the other Tuesday poets and poems that you'll find on the sidebar on the left.

Hey Columbus! by Thomas Hubbard

You step out of your sport utility vehicle and
begin fueling on pump number three while I

finish up on pump number four.

You eye my braid, my old car, my flute bag

in the rear window, and that expression comes
onto your pale, clean-shaven face.

You seem upset that I don't shuffle, step aside,

show embarrassment about my dark skin, and
why must I have feathers in plain view?

You are columbus, with your arrogance and

your privilege and your superior equipment,
you are that same murdering foreigner.

You wish I would go away, would not be

present right there with road dirt on my car,
would be somewhere else, doing menial work.

Hey columbus, nobody needs you here.  We

lived here for tens of thousands of years before
you came with your virulent diseases.

Hey, columbus, your arrogance wears thin, and

a cheap, pitiful little thief shows through — your
time has been already too long.

You are that same columbus who accepted

my Arawak cousins' hospitality, there on Hispaniola,
then gathered folks up to sell as slaves in europe.

You are that same columbus who noticed

gold ornaments, who demanded tribute, who
cut off hands or feet for not bringing enough.

You are that same columbus whose own

spanish priest, Fray Bartolome de Las Casas,
wrote about your unimaginable cruelty.

You might say that was long ago, that I am

only showing my ignorance and paranoia,
that you have nothing to do with it.

You might be lying, too.  Your arrogance

gives you away, shows you out.  You are that
same columbus who thought himself better.

Hey, columbus, haven't you stole enough, 

aren't you rich enough yet to get into that
exclusive little heaven you talk about?

Hey, columbus, if my honest half-breed presence

causes you discomfort — if you had rather your 
wife and kids didn't see me, why not leave?

You are that same columbus, yes it's you

stepping from your sport utility vehicle onto
the flat pavement of a filling station.

You are that same columbus and you can't hide,

even in the privacy of afternoon drinks at your

exclusive clubs — arrogant stink surrounds you.

You are that same old columbus who

dreams of empire, who pretends to own
this land, who is willing to kill for profit.

You are that same old columbus who brought us

cheap thrills, oil spills, insurance bills, close-order drills, 
targeted kills and land fills with radioactive waste.

You are that same old columbus, and you

wish I would go away?  After all these years,
after your people have done these things?

Hey columbus, why don't YOU go away?

Hey columbus, your scorn displeases me.
Hey columbus, your elections are phony.
Hey columbus, your time's about up, enit?
Hey columbus, haven't you made enough of a mess?
Hey columbus, gather up your trash and carry it away.
Hey columbus, go back where you came from.
Hey columbus, john wayne has plastic teeth.
Hey columbus, last call.
Hey columbus, keep moving, no stopping here, move right along.
Hey columbus, whooee up there, hoosh! soooie pig.

I heard Thomas Hubbard read this on Columbus Day — perfectly topical and addressing the myriad questions that had been running through my head on that day — an American holiday — chiefly, why is this a holiday?

Without pretense, Thomas Hubbard nails it here. The language ain't fancy, and neither are the sentiments, which contrast well with everything that Columbus represents:  the elitist, gas-guzzling, resource-consuming, earth-desecrating powers-that-be run amok. In essence, our ruling class. The phrase that comes to mind is American Exceptionalism, for whose offensiveness we may well thank/blame Columbus himself.

One this is certain:
we need more poems like this.
We need more poets shouting this from street corners and rooftops.
More, I say! More!

---

A mixed-blood, of (probably) Cherokee, Miami, Irish and English ancestry, the American poet Thomas Hubbard grew up among factory workers in the 1950's.  A teacher of writing and other subjects, he has worked also as a carpenter, blues musician and freelance writer. He won the Seattle's Grand Slam in 1995, and since has written three chapbooks, Nail and Other Hardworking Poems, Junkyard Dogz, and Injunz.  He has also published an anthology including 32 spoken word performers, titled Children Remember Their Fathers.  His poetry, fiction and reviews have been published in numerous journals.  Hubbard has served as vice president of the board of directors for the Washington Poets Association, and currently serves on the editorial staff of two magazines: Raven Chronicles and Cartier Street Review. 

---

This week's editor is the Seattle poet and artist T. Clear, who blogs here, and dislikes referring to herself in the third person.

When you've read Hey Columbus! Please check out the Tuesday Poets collective in the sidebar. We live all over the place from the US, the UK and Europe to New Zealand and Australia, and every Tuesday we post poems by ourselves or poets we admire.

If You Are Lucky, by Michelle McGrane

If you are lucky
you will carry one night with you
for the rest of your life,
a night like no other.
You won't see it coming.

Forget the day, the year.
It will arrive uninvoked,
an astrological anomaly.

You will remember
how every cell in your body
knew him, this stranger,

how you held your breath,
the way you searched his face.
This is how such evenings begin.

And you will be real in your skin,
bone and sinew; the way you always thought
you could be. Effortlessly.
This is how you will fit together.

His parted lips between your thighs,
your half-lit nipples darkening,
the hot-breathed arrival of desire,
the frenzied coupling
as you opened soundlessly
and the world flooded into you.

In the morning, maybe,
soon after sunrise
you will walk barefoot above a waterfall in the forest,
light-headed with the smell of sex,
laughing in your déshabillée.

You will carry
the music of this memory with you;
and from time to time,
in the small, withered hours,
your body will sing its remembering.


First published in The Suitable Girl (Pindrop Press).
Posted with the author's permission.
Editor: Rethabile Masilo
----------

Michelle McGrane

Michelle McGrane lives in Johannesburg and blogs at Peony Moon. Her collection, The Suitable Girl is published by Pindrop Press in the UK and Modjaji Books in South Africa. She is a member of SA PEN.

I don't know when I met Michelle, but I met her physically in London in June, 2012. Even before we talked poetry or she sat down to read, we had hit it off. Recently Michelle has been working on an important group whose aim is to expose, if not to curb, rape and sexual abuse. Some of her poems talk about love and about making love, and I thought it was fitting for such a spirit to be fighting against that very act done wrongly, and many times with disastrous consequences.

The account name on facebook is Against Rape, while the Twitter handle is @PoetsandArtists. Please support this endeavour.

Michelle's poetry is hard to pin down, and I think that's a good thing. No poem is similar to another in her book The Suitable Girl, or in her work posted many times on the Internet. I thank her for the words she writes and for granting me permission to share her poem on this forum.

Once you've read Michelle's poem please take time to enter some of the poems in the sidebar - chosen or written by our Tuesday Poets.
----------

This week's editor: 
My name's Rethabile Masilo. I am a poet from Lesotho and live in Paris, France. It's good to be part of this poetry family. I've got a book out there (Things That Are Silent) and am working on a second one. My poetry blog is here.
Sincerely,
Rethabile 

Thoughts of the Father by Philip Salom

Thoughts of the Father Ku / Work on What Has Been Spoiled
… Setting right what has been spoiled by the father. Danger. No blame rests upon 
 the departed father. He receives in his thoughts the deceased father. 

It hurts when you know thoughts of the father are in the son
 like a repertoire of non-events.

Thinking how the father spoiled the son, the sons
of broken marriages, my own.

Not 'spoilt', something lost, indefinably, gone missing
when he was spoil between them.

Demanding too much of him, bringing home a second mother
in place of the first? 

Work I have done wrong? He moves in a film of slow
postures, the strange mime

which adolescents make when practising annulment.
And keeping for themselves

enough to make of the self some stern amazement.
Sons are everywhere spoiling

their fathers’ art and craft! No blame. Hormones hit
like a room of conscientious

kick-boxers. The brute beauty of vocabulary reduced
to monogrunts and every ing 

now sounded un like feints, and blocks, and side-steps
language taken on the forearms.

Years later, I watch him from the airport as he leaves,
know I love him, know he knows it,

but finds it wrong in public, forcing off my arm. To
whom would I pray?

It is my father who has rowed across my body’s
nine-tenths water, to my son,

in spoiling for the simple life, of his before him, the bones
of my father lie satisfied and said

as thoughts in the son, a setting right after the break
like breath free now of the words

like a hull brought in over water, the river, the rowing,
his breath a repertoire of oar strokes

between the banks of birth and death. Echoes on the surface.
When thoughts of the son are in the father.

Posted with permission, also on Stillcraic.
Editor: Jennifer Compton

We had a Melbourne launch for Notes for the Translators, a collection of 142 Australian and NZ poets of which Philip Salom was one.  And I was very taken indeed by Philip Salom's reading of this poem. By some strange oversight, some infinitely mischievous work of the printer's devil, his notes to possible translators had been left out of the book. So the intended notes appeared on my blog post last week and appear again here.

Philip is an Australian poet and novelist who began publishing in 1980. In 2003 Philip Salom was recognised with the Christopher Brennan Award - a prize given for lifetime achievement in poetry, recognising a poet who produces work "of sustained quality and distinction". There is more on Philip on his website. And to invest in a copy of the fascinating book – Notes for the Translators – please email KitKelen@gmail.com

Notes by Philip Salom

In the mid 90s I wrote a sequence of poems prompted by the Commentaries of the I Ching. In this case (Thoughts of the Father), I wrote in response to Ku, the 18th hexagram. Above the poem, as epigraph, I have quoted those selections from the commentary that struck me most closely — in this case having an uncanny relevance to the estrangement from my son in the years following my divorce from his mother.

I felt distress and guilt over my son’s changed behaviour and personality, and I could not explain how unlike himself he had become. My son had been loving and extroverted as a child and now he was withdrawn, monosyllabic and sometimes angry; but the divorce coincided with his adolescence, and therefore it was difficult to know whether it was the separation or adolescence itself that had changed his personality. He was uneasy living with me and then with my new partner and eventually moved back with his mother (even though it was she who had initiated the divorce).

Still, I felt it was my ‘fault’, that the trauma had ‘spoiled’ him in some way – spoiled as in damage to his psychological state. Then I began to realise that he was far more like my father; they had more in common than I had with either. My father was modest, reserved, even withdrawn, and though he was rarely angry, he was markedly uneasy with his or other peoples’ emotions.

Themes

The above
themes run through the poem as the main continuity of behaviour, feeling, estrangement and sense of ‘spoiling’. This puns on spoils as in spoils of war, ironic in this case, as the spoils may themselves be broken, damaged. Another pun on spoil as in spoiling for a fight, expressing wildly, etc.

The nullity, annulment, non-events in feelings, communications, bonds, the sense of things gone, lost, missing, or kept back rather than shown or expressed. The Yin? And if so, then spoiling for a fight is the Yang. Ironic couple.

Adolescence, anger, change (this is the I Ching, after all!), uncertainty. The martial element: fighting feelings, restrained or controlled violence, kicking out at, fighting back, Kung Fu which the boy was learning, also related to Chinese culture. Repertoire as in learned acts, and behaviours, but also actions, fighting or resisting or defending. Blocks. And later in the poem, the un sounds come as the cruder phonetic/aural/vocalised version of ing verb endings, so fighting would become fightun and how these sounds are like grunts or fighting noises, or blocks (of both emotional and kung fu kind).

The ‘River’, rowing across, Charon, the boatman, the Styx or the waters leading to an afterlife, or the waters between birth and death, parallels here in the metaphor of the body (which is mainly water literally, and the wide water of parentage) and the genes of the deceased father (my father) crossing my body to be expressed (which is ironic, too, as a less expressive form) in the body of a son (not my body but my son’s ie the grandson). And the circular sense of the form in the poem which seems to ends as it began except with the reversal of knowledge (gained?) in the phrase — thoughts of the son are in the father.

This distancing device of the poem and the I Ching makes the poem poised above the personal and the impersonal, which is what I wanted from the poem and is in keeping with my ongoing critique of the too-easy lyric poem. Two line stanzas could signify: the father and son form, the shorelines of before and after, life and death. The mime of action without words, behaviour without response.

Line Notes

It hurts when you know: here the poem (firstly) addresses the poet, but then also addresses the reader, to consider the observation that follows. 

thoughts of the father are in the son like a repertoire of non-events. The son thinks of the father, but in this is a paradox, the acquired acts, behaviours, skills of repertoire – are non-events, ie: seem empty, null, denied perhaps.

Thinking how the father spoiled the son... Refers to father and son of the I Ching epigraph and the formal, distanced sense of definite article and then the change through broken marriages as situation to finally the personal: my own. 

Spoil, spoiled as in my notes, plus missing referring to lost and departed, and the bond spoiled...but the son is not spoilt (as in indulged, over-rewarded, etc)

Demanding too much of him, bringing home a second mother in place of the first? After a broken marriage, the father brings home another partner, a 'second mother' who could be perceived as 'replacing' the first. 

Work I have done wrong? He moves in a film of slow postures, the strange mime which adolescents make when practising annulment. Here enters the father as lyric subject, and the son denies him by movements, like the above repertoire, but this time movement of adolescent-style (universal!)
indifference to a parent through body language.

And keeping for themselves/enough to make of the self some stern amazement./ Sons are everywhere spoiling/  their fathers’ art and craft! No blame. This keeping back allows the naive and surprised engagement with world and self, but gives nothing much back to others. Natural (many sons do this to fathers (ironic repeat of spoiling) and not blame-worthy (and this no-blame directs to son and to father).

Hormones hit/like a room of conscientious/  kick-boxers. The brute beauty of vocabulary reduced/ to monogrunts and every ing/ now sounded un like feints, and blocks, and side-steps /language taken on the forearms. Here the movements take the specific form of resistance and violence, of martial arts, (also note the echo of art and craft, but against...) which is a metaphor of what the son is deliberately doing and also learning (perhaps). And a fairly likely echo or association here of martial arts with Chinese culture. Turning ing endings of English words into un - the grunt, the out-breath of hitting, sounding uncouth, as he extends his resistance even to language.

Years later, I watch him from the airport as he leaves, know I love him, know he knows it, but finds it wrong in public, forcing off my arm. To whom would I pray? The major time-shift, the retrospection and assumption of an easing of the above tensions, denials, etc, but not the denial of love shown, still fended off but not fought off... It is now reserve about emotions, and even language. And note the rhetorical question following as an echo of Confucius: When you give offense to heaven, to whom can you pray?

It is my father who has rowed across my body’s nine-tenths water, to my son, in spoiling for the simple life, of his before him The sudden realisation that the reserve, simple rather than complex life, etc, of my son is very like that of my father, as if the DNA of my father has moved/rowed across my body (which is a body of water: biologically, symbolically, mythically - and metaphysically?) to my son.

of my father lie satisfied and said as thoughts in my son, a setting right after the break, like breath free now of the words, and this knowledge satisfies my father (who is deceased though the poem doesn't say this) and the grandson, a homecoming of tendencies, which make sense, perhaps set right the break (not of bones but bonds) and is breath now, more elemental than complicated words...

like a hull brought in over water, the river, the rowing, his breath a repertoire of oar strokes between the banks of birth and death And this is where the feeling, the knowledge, the breath is going, across the elemental water, and again a repertoire of behaviour, of being, in the gap or river of life between birth and death.

Echoes on the surface. When thoughts of the son are in the father. The echoes are all these insights and overlaps, and recurrences, and of course the repeats in the actual poem of lines and words, such as repertoire, spoil, art and craft, rowing, water... and here too is the final, major, reconciling reversal of the first line - thoughts of the father are in the son which now becomes thoughts of the son are in the father. Where, of course, they have been all the time!

When you've read and enjoyed Thoughts of the Father, enter into the world of the sidebar on this site to find more Tuesday poets ...

Jennifer Compton is Tuesday Poem editor this week. Born in Wellington and living in Melbourne, Jennifer publishes poems and play scripts and has just been announced the winner of Australia's distinguished Newcastle Poetry Prize. She has also won NZ's prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award with her manuscript 'This City', which was published by Otago University Press, and other numerous prizes and residencies including the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington. 

If we could speak like Wolves by Kim Moore

if I could wait for weeks for the slightest change
in you, then each day hurt you in a dozen
different ways, bite heart-shaped chunks
of flesh from your thighs to test if you flinch
or if you could be trusted to endure,
if I could rub my scent along your shins to make
you mine, if a mistake could be followed
by instant retribution and end with you
rolling over to expose the stubble and grace
of your throat, if it could be forgotten

the moment the wind changed, if my eyes
could sharpen to yellow, if we journeyed
each night for miles, taking it in turns
to lead, if we could know by smell
what we are born to, if before we met

we sent our lonely howls across the estuary
where in the fading light wader birds stiffen
and take to the air, then we could agree
a role for each of us, more complicated
than alpha, more simple than marriage.

Copyright Kim Moore 2012
'If We Could Speak Like Wolves', published by Smith/Doorstop Books
Available as a Paper book or in E-format
Reproduced with Permission 
Editor Kathleen Jones

It's National Poetry Day this week in the UK, so I've chosen a young British poet with a very bright future. It’s difficult to describe the way that Kim Moore writes - it’s lyrical, honest, sometimes surreal, often funny, but always managing to find the line through to something more profound. Some critics have said that Kim Moore is ‘modernizing the lyric tradition’.

This is the title poem of a prize-winning pamphlet, winner of the Poetry Business prize, judged by Carol Anne Duffy, which was published last year and has already been re-printed. 'If We Could Speak Like Wolves' was also one of The Independent newspaper's 'books of the year' in 2012.  Kim Moore has won an impressive list of awards - including the Poetry Society's Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and is widely regarded as 'One to Watch'!

I like Kim's poetry for its musicality.  She's a musician and music teacher and I think this has a real influence on the way she uses language.  This poem, for instance, has a momentum that starts with the title and carries it urgently through to the very last line. It's a journey as well as an analysis of the complexity of relationships.  It also has an important message - that we should be more instinctive, less intellectual, more aware of our 'animal' natures and less afraid of them.  If only .....

This week's editor Kathleen Jones is an English poet and biographer living part of the time in Italy.  She blogs over at  'A Writer's Life'  Her most recent collection of poetry is 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21', which won the 2011 Straid Award. 

Please take the time to click on the sidebar and take a look at what the Tuesday Poets are posting on their own blogs.  It's a treasure-trove of wonderful poetry!

Digging in the garden after dark by Pat White

for Seamus Heaney

this morning the blade bites clean
through soil turning up, on the way
worms, spiders and a surfeit of others
at work in the everlasting dark

the news is it is your turn to spend
some time with them, nothing is ended
changing places perhaps, but ritual
recognises impact on those left behind

bespectacled vultures might pick over
the life’s efforts, determine what’s
worth keeping according to the canon,
they lack access to secret conversations

the way your word entered the heart
of the matter, those books taken off
shelves the last few days, good grief
able to remind any of us, how whispering

remnants of your digging for lines, has
somehow entered as a knife would
clean, deep and permanent, parting
resistance between the shoulders

to enter the body somewhere
between truth and aspiration, to say
again with all the precision of hope
that liturgy for the fearful heart

be not afraid, don’t be afraid

_____

posted with permission from the poet 
Editor: Mary McCallum

After Seamus Heaney died last month, after all the quotes from his poems on Facebook - some I'd never read before - others I had, after cradling that last book of his - baby heavy in its cream cover, after thinking of the Beowulf, after listening to my poet friends tell me how much they loved Heaney and realising he was a secret I hadn't shared, after the shock of the thought of a poet gone who one day I thought I'd hear read - talk to perhaps, after all of that, I received an email from my author friend Pat White - whose book on writer Peter Hooper I am to publish soon.

I didn't notice the subject line for Pat's email. Instead, I opened it, and all it said was this:

Pat White

One of my mainstays really

hope the day goes well for you

I glanced down, and there was a poem attached. So I downloaded it, read its quietness and digging and earth and worms, and liked the way it was like Pat talking. He is after all a man of the soil - a farmer once on New Zealand's West Coast who now grows olives in the Wairarapa, has worked in libraries and bookshops, painted pictures and published poems and written an excellent book called How the Land Lies: of longing and belonging (VUP) in 2010. 

The land, you see. Pat knows about that. And we've dug a garden, once, him and I when he was writer in residence at Randell Cottage in Wellington. We planted potatoes (I think) and other useful things. Then, after thinking about Pat and his poetry and the Wairarapa soil and the pleasures of digging in the dark, I read the subject line of the email: 'Seamus Heaney'. Realised then Pat wasn't just writing about himself here, but  about that singular Irish poet, and how that poet had shown him how to dig - not earth, but wormy words.

The digging in Seamus' poems always felt like real digging, a splitting and turning back of the earth in all its damp, wormy shininess, and there was awe for the dark health there and the shine on the spade, and an innocence, too, about what to look for and how long to look at it, and when to start work on the words to tuck it down and make it something. Seamus Heaney worked at poetry for roughly half a century. May he rest in peace, and thanks, Pat, for the poem.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

From Digging by Seamus Heaney

When you've listened to Seamus and read Pat, look to the Tuesday Poem sidebar where 30 poets reside, posting poems by themselves and others they admire every Tuesday.

 This week's editor, Mary McCallum, has published writing which includes poetry, a novel The Blue, and (soon) a children's novel with Gecko Press. She also teaches creative writing and owns a small press called Makaro. She lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand. 

January Begins by Carolyn McCurdie

For New Year I wish you

Janus, the god who looks forward

and back, till his pupils dilate, intoxication

of distance. On your calendar it’s his month.

Here is the photo he hangs on your wall:

salt caravans in Niger,

from a paraglider, so high that camels

seem strung as if notes on scribbled staves of song.

On the horizon, a thin sprinkle like fire-blackened grain:

another caravan. One way with millet to trade, the return journey

with salt. They follow the line of the sand dunes, begin

in autumn, stop

before summer rains.

Those little blips are human beings, commas, apostrophes, keeping the line.

My wish for you: Janus, the god of transition. Here, in the last

islands of human arrival, the ancient

journeys belong to birds. When autumn comes, you’ll stand

on the beach to watch

shearwaters, day after day, low to the ocean, wings tipping the spray and the rocks

of the headlands.

They loop the Pacific, come back in spring.

The birds, the camels, doodle, meander,

embellish the lines on the mental map.

Janus, the god who lays out

mental maps. With a thumb nail he flattens

the folds. The paraglider delights him, the long

view, the old is the new.  He sings its audacity.

When you first learned to balance, unsteady, surprised,

this was the song that he gave you.

Since then, self-mutilation

of bumper-to-bumper, the queues in the customs hall.

Still he sings it, insists, on your calendar,

through the letters of your name, till you play it in your finger bones

like crystals of sunlight

that quiver down dunes, till you push out from the beach, dance it

in the arches of your feet as they brace

on wet slanted wood, on the slow-rising heft

of water. As they take one step.

Around and around it comes back. Can you hear it

that song? Yes. The intoxication

of song.

After rain, and when the wind shifts to nor’ west.

I wish this for you: Janus, who unlocks

the doors and tells you, the world, the wide shining world

is open. Go through.

'January Begins' was first published in Poetry NZ vol 46 and is posted here with the poet's permission.
Editor: Claire Beynon

George Steinmetz | Camel Shadows

Reading Carolyn McCurdie's poetry, I experience a kind of 'lift-off' as if my feet are no longer touching ground. Her words transport me to a world entirely 'other', her poet's landscape and sensibility at once intimate, restrained, vast, dramatic and original. Carolyn has a way of capturing the expansiveness of the whole - the overview - whilst simultaneously zooming in to her subjects with metronomic measure and penetrating accuracy. An air of enquiry, of 'scrupulous kindness', seem ever-present. Her poems open readers to encounters with place, persons, concepts and considerations that are spatial and sensory, reverent and relevant. And her poems are beautiful - compassionate and graceful in their engagement with life's subtler realities. Carolyn brings tenderness and light to themes that might elsewhere be cloaked in darkness or weighted by human frailty; our common, uncommon story.

About January Begins, Carolyn writes, "One of the things my sister gave me at Christmas 2011 was a calendar in which the January photograph was the one in the poem of camels in Niger. It was taken by 'National Geographic' photographer George Steinmetz from a motorised paraglider. It bewitched me and the poem seemed to arise quite straightforwardly from that. Then, quite a while after completing the poem, I began to understand other things about it.  In June 2011 my mother had died, aged 91, at the end of a life that had been diminishing for some time. I had been her carer for 11 years. Turned one way, I can hear in the poem that I am speaking to her. Turn it another way, and she is speaking to me."

I am struck by the way January Begins carries the hushed notes of Carolyn's conversation with her mother whilst at the same time speaking (or so it seems to me) into the heart of our current global situation. Whether or not she intended this, I find myself challenged to move with the poet as she transitions from the personal to the universal, from the private sentiments exchanged in her home to dialogue of a global nature and scale. In a flash, she takes us from the image in the calendar to the paraglider, 'so high that camels seem strung as if notes on scribbled staves of song'; desert expanse and coastal landscape are drawn together as if by sleight of hand, juxtaposed in bold language and plain sight; we find ourselves considering the possibility distance and death might be no more than a matter of perception, catch a glimpse of ourselves and our world as coordinates on the same map or - perhaps -  as two voices capable of music, harmony, collaboration.

Sharing airspace with her paraglider, we are granted a moment or two in which to witness ourselves and our planet from up close and at a distance - an opportunity to consider and come home to some new understanding of features and fractures, barrenness and riches. For me, the second and fifth stanzas seem especially suggestive of this ---  

My wish for you: Janus, the god of transition. Here, in the last

islands of human arrival, the ancient

journeys belong to birds. When autumn comes, you’ll stand

on the beach to watch

shearwaters,

                 and

like crystals of sunlight

that quiver down dunes, till you push out from the beach, dance it

in the arches of your feet as they brace

on wet slanted wood, on the slow-rising heft

of water. As they take one step.

The poem's final stanza brings us and this conversation full circle. The poet addresses her mother with tender, permission-giving urgency and at the same time issues us all with an invitation.

I wish this for you: Janus, who unlocks

the doors and tells you, the world, the wide shining world

is open. Go through.

Carolyn McCurdie lives in Dunedin, New Zealand, in a sun-filled house that looks out on hills, bush and farm land - a 40 minute walk to the city centre. She has been writing poetry for approximately ten years. Her poems have been published widely in print and on-line. After the Art Gallery was highly commended in the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition 2011 (judge: James Brown) and Making up the Spare Beds for the Brothers Grimm won first place in the NZ Poetry Society's 2013 International Poetry Competition. In his judge's report Vincent O'Sullivan wrote, ". . . Only a very good poet writes lines as effectively as that. Or so direct and elusive at the same time. In one sense, everything is so in place. Shift focus a little, everything carries threat. And that sense of apparent domestic order - there are cracks, stains, puzzles, that don't allow us to believe a word of it, even as we cannot rationally say why. All we are aware of is where the poem entirely directs us - the world is not as we see it, even when it is."

In addition to poetry, Carolyn writes short stories for adults (in 1998 she won the Lilian Ida Smith Award for these) and fiction for children. Her compelling fantasy novel The Unquiet was published in 2006 by Longacre Press Ltd. Penelope Todd, writer and founding director of Rosa Mira Books describes Carolyn as 'a writer of quiet power'. Yes.  A writer of poise, potency and presence, too. 

In her reply to my letter expressing my wish for her to be this week's featured Tuesday Poet, Carolyn mentioned she'd be away at the time January Begins was posted. "In a few weeks I leave for what is, at the age of 66, my first big overseas adventure. I am using money that Mum left me. Part of the plan is to visit the London street where she grew up, and then on to Glasgow to stand in the street that was my father's home. Circles. . . "

Indeed! Safe and stimulating travels to you, Carolyn. 

Please visit Carolyn's page on the New Zealand Society of Authors website - www.authors.org.nz - and for more of her poems, visit Deep South www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth 

To enjoy another week's selection of fine Tuesday Poems, please click on the links on the side bar. 

This week's editor, Claire Beynon, is an artist, writer and independent researcher based in Dunedin, New Zealand. She blogs here and here. Her website is aging gracelessly and is sorely in need of an update.

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News for all interested poets  |  CASELBERG POETRY PRIZE 2013 

Entries for the Caselberg Prize (First Prize NZ$500) will be welcomed between 1 October and 31 December 2013. For more information please go to www.caselbergtrust.org

A Poem For The Innocents by Geoffrey Philp

A killing moon peeks through leaves
of trumpet trees in full bloom
for Lent, their barks crisscrossed
by wild strokes of a machete
when my son tried to help me weed
our garden, overrun with dandelions,
branches, leaves, a bounty of seed
and thorns, side by side, under clusters
of suns bursting through the branches.

Shadows flicker across the wall upstairs,
over Buzz Lightyear's grin, Mr. Potato
Head's sigh, and under a map
dotted with cities that fill his dreams.

What promises will I make
when I climb the stairs
before he falls asleep to the noise
of the television with cluster
bombs blooming in the sky
over Baghdad? What comfort
can I give him as I draw the sheets
over his shoulders, kiss his forehead,
when he worries that if he closes his eyes,
his Aunt Batsheva, half a world away,
will not rise from her bed in Gan Yavne,
thirty-seven miles west of Ramah
where Rachel wept for her children
and refused to be comforted.

The map over his bed now frightens
him, and I cannot convince him,
despite the miles and miles of oceans
and deserts, that the machete
under his bed will not make him safer,
any more than the sacrifice of innocents
will save us, for he knows,
he knows, somewhere
between the Tigris and Euphrates,
a wave of steel races toward Babylon.


~ posted with the permission of the author

Editor: Rethabile Masilo

Geoffrey Philp

I "met" Geoffrey Philp many years ago, and fell in love with his poetry. I think perhaps the first of his poems I
read was Easy Skanking. 'Skanking' is a sort of rhythmic dance performed to reggae music or ska, and with that I suppose you've guessed that the poet or the poem is related to Jamaica.

What I like indeed in the poems and writing of Mr Philp is precisely the rhythm, this beat that comes up without announcing its presence, like a simple communication between African djembe drums or Sioux smoke signals. I cannot deny that I also immensely like their skank talk about difficult subjects such as politics, oppression and liberty. Which inevitably brings up another name: Bob Marley.

My poet sister, Michelle McGrane, has a post on Geoffrey's latest collection, Dub Wise; it includes several other poems and links (Amazon, Geoffrey's blog, etc). Geoffrey Philp is also out, among other things, to have Marcus Garvey exonerated by President Obama.

What promises will I make
when I climb the stairs

These words have always reminded me of my own father. I don't know whether he thought them, but our experience as a family attaches me to them, and to the whole poem, in which a parent suffers over a view given to their child by the world. My own experience as a kid is of politics at table and at school and in prayer. I have personally tried to write poems about that very experience, some of it violent. After reading and rereading A Poem For The Innocents, I found myself writing more poems about the same experience I'd had as a kid, on top of those I'd already written, using some of the same feelings, but getting fresh strength from Geoffrey's poem.

Geoffrey Philp has written a children's book, Grandpa Sydney's Anancy Stories, a novel, called Benjamin, My Son, books of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien as well as the more recent Who's Your Daddy, and five poetry collections, among them Exodus and Other Poems, Florida Bound, hurricane center, xango music, Twelve Poems and A Story for Christmas, as well as Dub Wise. He blogs at http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com and teaches English at Miami Dade College.
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Here are three more links to visit:
1. An interview with the poet
2. Google
3. Bachata
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As for me, I am a poet from Lesotho and live in Paris, France. I'm happy to be part of this poetry family. I have one book out (Things That Are Silent) and am working on a second one. It is all very exciting. Rethabile Masilo. 
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Matangi Tai by Sia Figiel

A wind has just blown through Malaetoa
But it ain't no ordinary wind
It is a wind that that has woken me up
Calling me from Mesa, Arizona
Sia, wake up
Wake up sis
How can you still sleep at this early hour?
Didn't you hear me back in May
When these motherfuckers came at me with patons...
And fists
In front of a grocery store
Sirens
Confusion
And I'm just there minding my own
Jumped by mens in uniforms
Supposedly here to protect us
To serve and to protect
Das was on the side of da cars dey drive
SIs, even da judge says I don't deserve protec-shun
Threw my ass in jail on the count of mental problems
Mental problems my az
Couldn't find the Ocean in dis here landscape
Dis here desert
Searching for it all 37 years of my life sis
But gotta tell you man
I'm tired
Tired of looking
Tired of always looking out the corner of my eye to catch a wave in this heat
This desert
This purple mountain majesty of A-Me-ri-Caaaaaa!
Just stopped by to say Ofa atu
I gotsa go sis
Epeli and them dudes calling me from Pulotu
I gotsa go
But e! Keep listening to dat SEAL song you laig listening to
And keep rocking 'em bikinis and show em sis
Show em the salt
Showe em that while dey might taste salt in a lake out here
Dere's a whole motherfuckin' ocean where you and I was born
And I going back there
Going back to my roots, yeah, yeah
Reggae Music and water
Is all this brown assed nigger is axing fo'
P.S: Don't go inciting no violence now sis
I know you and that heart of yours
I can see your salt already boilin' girl
But eh, fink of da mens Martin Luther King Jr.
And Mahatma Ghandi
And taste me in your ocean girl.
Is what I axe.
Peace Out

Fa'anoanoa (Melancholy)

by Sia Figiel 

Poem posted with permission.
Author's comment:
Before Matangi Tai was to be buried in Mesa, Arizona, the National Tongan American Association held a peace march for him. Several people spoke: Bishops, Family Members, Singers, Community Members and myself. I had been asked the night before the march to write this poem. It was August 2013.

When I submitted the poem to the president, Mrs. Fahina Passi, a fantastic woman, she told me to tone it down. I understood it was in regard to the word 'motherfucker' in the poem, which I knew stood out like a sore thumb in a Tongan gathering ... it would, too, in a Samoan context.

But when I got there that night and felt the spirit of Matangi Tai and the thickness of grief in the air, I explained to the audience how my poem came about. I also told them that I apologised for offending anyone, and that if my words should offend anyone, to throw them towards an uninhabited island, where they will offend no one. BUT tonight, I will insult Matangi Tai and his memory if I don't read the poem I wrote for him in its entirety. I did read it and it turned out to be the right thing to do as Tongans (the young generation) came up and embraced me afterwards. So did older Tongans who said it was 'powerful'.

Editor Helen McKinlay:
Matangi Tai died in jail a few days after his arrest and imprisonment in Mesa, Arizona. For more information see here. Sia wrote the poem in August this year. The dignity and love which encircles the poem and the tragedy of Matanga Tai, are an example to all.

I am always looking for poetry which speaks of the indigenous origins of the poet. Poetry which springs from the poet’s deep love for their homeland; its culture, its beliefs and its values.  Poetry which sometimes bears the scars of conflict, but never bears a grudge…poetry which makes us laugh from the belly and cry from the heart. A few weeks back I found such a poem: Songs of the fat brown woman, and began a search for the poet.

On the way I discovered an amazing woman, Sia Figiel, a single mum with two boys, an aunty of seven, an award-winning novelist and poet, a performance artist, (the first Pacific Islander to read and perform at the Shakespeare Globe Theatre), an academic with two degrees in liberal arts and history, and a visual artist. Her paintings have been exhibited in Leipzig and Berlin, Germany, where she held an artist's studio and lived for three years from 1991-94. Oh, and did I mention she teaches Polynesian Dance and Culture?

Sia is also a health activist and a self-proclaimed Rainbow Warrior of Maleatoa.  'A rainbow warrior,' explains Sia, 'is someone who has decided to take charge of their life, by becoming more proactive in their own healing or in the healing of close and dear ones who are suffering from Diabesity (diabetes and obesity). Malaetoa means a resting place for warriors.' Her Facebook page is called 'Sia Figiel has diabetes. Diabetes doesn’t have Her'. Sia is successfully fighting diabetes and its causes on a daily basis She has lost over 45 kilos in the last year!

Sia Figiel

Sia says,

As a writer and as a public figure, I hid my diabetes from the public. I was ashamed to admit that I had been diagnosed as I felt it a sign of weakness. That I had lost control. However, as the years went by, and more and more family, loved ones and young people kept dying from diabesity-related complications, I felt that I could no longer stay silent about these killer diseases. That I had to speak up. I had to act.

To read more of Sia’s inspiring story go here.

My emails circled the South Pacific and introduced me to a variety of lovely people, before I finally managed to contact Sia with an invitation to be guest on the Tuesday Poem hub. She was finishing a new novel but somehow found time to say yes and provide a poem, as well as answering all my questions. Thank you for the incredible journey, Sia, and welcome to the Tuesday Poem Blog. Thanks to those who helped me find you.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Where we once belonged (1996), Pasifika Press won the Best First Book award in the South East Asia/South Pacific region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1997.

Two other novels,
Girl in the Moon Circle (1996) (Institute of Pacific Studies) and They Who Do Not Grieve (1999), Kaya Press 2003.

To a Young Artist in Contemplation (1998), is a prose poetry collection.

Terenesia, is a collaborative CD of performance poetry with the poet Dr Teresia Teaiwa.

Sia Figiel, who wrote the novel “Where We Once Belonged” (1996), is 29 and she is now the next phase in Pacific writing in English. The novel is a beautiful mix of satire and parody. It is a pastiche of styles; she breaks into poetry, straight sequences of it, and I think that is where we are heading. That is where my work has been heading....she will influence our literature for many years to come.  Maualaivao Professor, Sir Albert Wendt.

Sia's new novel Headless is written from the perspective of a gay Samoan man who attends a two-year writing program at Stanford University. It is in this class that he starts writing stories of his family which chronicle his family's life history, and - in particular - the historical connections between Samoa, American Samoa and the United States since 1900 to present. The expected publishing date is DECEMBER and the publisher is LITTLE ISLAND PRESS NZ.

Fa'anoanoa II

by Sia Figiel

BIOGRAPHY: Sia Figiel was born in Western Samoa and raised in the villages of Matautu Tai, Tanugamanono and Vaivase, the roots of her literary work. As a teenager, she came to New Zealand to finish her schooling. Sia is acknowledged as Samoa's first contemporary woman writer. Well known as a performance poet, she is a frequent guest at literary festivals.

Her work is translated into German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Her writer’s residencies include the University of Hawaii, the University of Technology, Sydney, the University of the South Pacific, Laucala Campus Fiji, and the Catalan Ministry of Arts and Culture, Barcelona Spain. 

She was the Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa Department of English, and was appointed the Arthur Lynn Andrews Visiting Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, an honour also given to Professor Albert Wendt. 

During a decade spent in American Samoa, Ms. Figiel was a Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Faleomavaega Eni Hunkin and worked with high school students in Pago Pago, until moving to America a year ago. She is now living in Utah, where she will be a language and culture consultant to MANA Academy which opens in September 2013.

This week's editor is Helen McKinlay. Helen is a poet and children's author at present living in the 'Top of the South' (Island), New Zealand. She blogs at gurglewords

Before you leave, check out the rich offerings from other Tuesday Poets in the left hand side bar.