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.

* 

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.
----------
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.

Marco Polo by Ali Alizadeh

Marco Polo

Maybe it’s the natural
extension of immigration.  Maybe

it’s the awesome travel
bugs, making my wife’s feet

uncommonly itchy.   I’m not
surprised, at any rate, to hear

the paediatrician’s nickname
for our son. ‘Marco Polo’ suits

his - in utero - trajectory
along the Silk Road, from

Kublai Khan’s Forbidden City
to the snow-covered stones of a caravanserai

in central Turkey.  Not to mention
the Australian interregnum

where ultrasound scans
revealed his sex.  But our Marco

probably won’t pen a Travels
as he won’t know the other

of unending expedition, say,
cherished waterways of Venice, in short

a concrete home.  Are we monstrous
parents?  Why have we conceived

and delivered a life into the world
in transition?  If held to account

by a solicitous young man
with my eyes (and my wife’s better

eyebrows) one day, accused
of depriving him of his deserved

comforts of sedentary genesis
(motherland, mother tongue

two ebullient grandmothers, etc)
I can only offer an image: removing

picture frames, tribal ornaments
from the hooks; clearing the drawers

of wrinkled notepads with withered ideas
and perforated socks; tearing

the hooks off the walls.  And then
the bright outline of the picture frames

vacated on the otherwise drab
dust-darkened surface of the wall.  It’s this

record of the passage of time
the contrast between the original

preserved shade and colour
and the rest (ditto our lives) dog-eared

by mould, sunlight, scratches
of nature and accidents.  It’s this

visible discrepancy between
what we were and what we’ve become,

the possibility to uncover
and see it.  The nomads treasure

wisdom; the reality of aging
towards death.  You see, Marco

- I’ll tell him - if we can see
death looming, like a dark island

on the navigator’s horizon
then we won’t be shocked when

time’s run out.  This means
a life without our primal fear.  That’s why

we travel.

© Ali Alizadeh
from Ashes in the Air (University of Queensland Press)
Reproduced with permission

Editor: Kathleen Jones (UK)

Ali Alizadeh was born in Tehran in 1976 and migrated to Australia in 1991.  He graduated with Honours in Creative Arts from Griffith University, Gold Coast and holds a PhD in Professional Writing from Deakin University, Melbourne.  He has taught at universities in Australia, China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and has also worked as street performer, hair-wrapper, and delivery driver.  He is a writer of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, drama and literary criticism and this is his sixth book.  He lives with his wife and son.

I love this poem - the elongated shape, like a journey, and the progression of thought.  Instability, repression and conflict have brought a flow of refugees from the Middle East across the globe, and it shows no sign of slowing down as the area becomes increasingly turbulent.  A sense of belonging is very strong in human beings - knowing where and who you come from helps us to know who we are. Giving birth to a child in a foreign country, realising that the child is never going to know their grandmothers, or the everyday details of the lives their parents have left, is a strange experience.

In the poem Ali Alizadeh confronts the questions he feels his son may one day ask.  Why?  Why did you leave and deprive me of my cultural heritage?  In return the poet presents the child with the images of hurried departure - seizing possessions, tearing even the hooks from the walls.  Hooks attach us to places, to material things.  The emigrant must leave them all behind.  But then he tells his son that it is death, the primal fear, ‘looming, like a dark island’ that is the real reason for the transit across the globe to live in a foreign country. ‘This means/a life without our primal fear.  That’s why/we travel.’

'Marco Polo' comes from the collection Ashes in the Air, published by Queensland University Press.  The collection covers a wide range of subject matter - much of it hard-hitting and political; cultural contrasts, the History of the Veil, Sky Burial (for John Kinsella), and personal poems that recall an ‘archaeology of suffering’ as well as the ecstatic joy of new landscapes and relationships - love ...

‘we flew from the profane towards a paradise

and earthly constellations, stirred by something
like the love that moves the sun and the other stars’. [My Divine Comedy]

Emigrants and refugees are nomads, often by force rather than by choice - a life of 'unending expedition'.  The loss of the Motherland creates a hunger, an empty gap between 'what we were and what we've become'.  But being a nomad also presents opportunities and a richness of experience.  As Ali writes in the poem, 'The nomads treasure wisdom'.

But that wisdom is hard-won.  In Ali Alizadeh's poem 'The Suspect' he describes what it feels like to be 'the other'.  In Iran

'I was an "apostate", principal's term for
the boy who failed Koran Studies and wrote

an essay on Leonardo da Vinci.'

But in the west, he is someone who makes other people nervous, '. . .   shackled to a passport

etched with Born in Tehran.  There I was
suspected of perfidy to the Faith, an Infidel

-wannabe.  Over here I am suspected
of terror.'

There is a bleakness about the conclusion, that someone with a Middle Eastern passport, and an interest in Western ideas and literature, can find themselves between 'the Islamic Republic's

Evin Prison, pliers pinching their finger
-nails;  or sleep-deprived and hooded indefinitely

in the dark solitaries of Guantanamo Bay.' 

'Ashes in the Air' is a brilliant, unique, collection.

Kathleen Jones is a poet, novelist and biographer, living between Italy and England.  She spent almost a decade living in the Middle East, where she began to be interested in its literary traditions, and to realise what it's like to be nomadic. Her latest collection 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21', published by Templar is about belonging and departure.  She blogs at A Writer’s Life and her website can be found at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Please take a look at all the contributions in the sidebar and read what the other Tuesday Poets are posting. 

If you liked this post, you might like the memoir, by Marjane Satrapi, called 'Persepolis'. 

Early Growth by Rachel O'Neill

At her party the boy runs best with the hard-boiled egg. During
the obstacle course she meets him at the bird feeder on top of
which raisins are scattered. ‘I’m a bird,’ she nibbles and the boy
really does bob and nod. Later he says, ‘we’re twins, and I can
telepathically read the thoughts in your head,’ at which point she
makes a dent in his leg. It’s spring. Sometimes she hears an animal
cry as it comes out of its tent, or what’s it called? The uterus. It’s
taken from its mother and put on the teat. After the birthday cake
the kids run around, they bleat, skitter and find their feet. They
start to count the exposed growth rings on a tree stump, loops as
fine as hairs. One father keeps calling these the inseparable years.

Poem published with permission.
Editor: Sarah Jane Barnett 

Rachel O'Neill
Photo Credit: Kim Lesch

Rachel O’Neill is a writer, visual artist and editor based in Paekākāriki on the Kapiti Coast. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications, including Best New Zealand Poems 2011, Paper Radio, the inaugural The Long and the Short of It competition book published by Sport and Unity Books, and issues of Turbine, JAAM, and Brief. She completed a conjoint degree in English and Sculpture at the University of Auckland (2005) and a Masters in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern letters (2008). Her debut collection, One Human in Height, will be released by Hue & Cry Press this year. O'Neill also blogs at Little Disturbances.

"Early Growth" was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2011. Of the poem, O’Neill said: ‘If my memory is correct, children's birthday parties in 1980s rural New Zealand were the kind of epic affairs that disturbed the myth that the country is not very populated. It seemed like every man, woman and child came to some of my parties. My mother put eggs on spoons and we ran as fast as we could without dropping them. There was also an unusual game that involved completing an obstacle course involving giant outdoor furniture.

In the poem there is an entanglement of child and adult point of view. It mirrors the way we humans can easily be confused by certain transitions, say from a sense of new life to experiencing more complex feelings around what new life might mean.’

What made me want to share this poem was my personal response. My son turned two in July, and the first two years of his life seem to have happened in seconds. I know; the sentiment's cliche! Still, the image of the "rings on a tree stump," which the father then calls "these the inseparable years," perfectly evokes the way childhood tumbles away. While this reading is somewhat different to the interpretation given by O'Neill, I think it speaks to, as she states, the "complex feelings" that life creates.

This week's editor Sarah Jane Barnett is a writer and reviewer who lives in Wellington. Her first collection of poems, A Man Runs into a Woman, was published by Hue & Cry Press in 2012, and has been shortlisted for best poetry collection of the year in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. She blogs at theredroom.org

When you've read Early Growth, do try some of the other Tuesday Poems out there. Check out the sidebar. 

Grass by Jill Jones

Empty girl I was, so far inside, grass didn't know me
It was something unbending, only light seemed to touch
But so long as I could smell the sea, so long as salt
I had extrications, music, that fire, phase & beat
And all around the world went off, banners & avenues, cruelties
Now it's come one, come all, a kind of sassy hoedown
The grass is going, it cracks & withers sadly, almost infinitely
But I'm becoming younger as my dead drugs strangle each-to-each
I go out with skin mixes, cantos & some fear rocking
I stand or fall but now I can feel that region's joy, the bones


from Broken/Open, Salt Publishing, 2005 published with permission

Editor: Catherine Bateson


Jill Jones, an award-winning Australian poet, has published seven full-length books of poetry including Ash is Here, So are Stars (Walleah Press, 2012), Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), and Broken/Open (Salt, 2005). A new book, The Beautiful Anxiety, is due from Puncher and Wattmann in late 2013. Her work is represented in a number of major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry.

I really love and admire this poem. It richly skirts narrative moving the narrator from fragmented yearning to a more complete self-knowledge which acknowledges both personal history and the unknown. One of the things about Jones's work that I've always enjoyed is her ability to change register and insert an unexpected, and sometimes salty, vernacular into the formal structure. '....come one, come all, a kind of sassy hoedown' does this here and the internal rhyme and rhythm of 'come one, come all' with 'I stand or fall' a few lines later works beautifully.

If you want to read more poems by Jill Jones, you can find some here. Thank you, Jill, for Grass.

Catherine Bateson is an Australian poet and writer for children and young adults. She is currently on a residency in Paris, funded by the Australian Council for the Arts. Her latest children's book, Star, was published last year by Omnibus Books. Her latest collection of poetry, Marriage for Beginners, John Leonard Press, came out in 2009.

After you've read Grass, try some of the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar by or chosen by our Tuesday Poets. 

Where, by Paula Morris

Where are you from, I ask the waiter.

He is from Brazil, Poland, Florence.

Sometimes he is from Mexico, and I

say: so is my nephew’s fiancée.

In Auckland the taxi driver who lives in

Henderson is from Afghanistan. There are

forty of them there, he says. They love it, but
they have to make their own bread.

In New York the taxi driver is from Pakistan.

He asks me where I’m from, and wants to

talk cricket. His dream, he says, is to live

with his brother in Bradford.

In Auckland the dentist is from Brazil. In

Sheffield the café owner is from Auckland.

In London our waiter is from Glasgow.

In Glasgow our waiter is from Melbourne, like

my doctor in Iowa City, the nose specialist,

who leans over me on the operating table.

Where are you from, he asks me.

I tell him Auckland. Good on ya, he says.

Sometimes in Auckland the taxi driver is

from Auckland. He is not from anywhere

but there. If he’s old enough, I tell him my

dream, bringing back the trams.

Thanks to Paula Morris whose poem 
is posted with her permission

Editor Renee Liang

Paula Morris is a fiction writer of English and Maori descent. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, she's studied and worked in a number of places - York, Manchester, London, New York, Wellington, Iowa City, New Orleans, Glasgow - and is currently Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Sheffield.

Her most recent novel, Rangatira, won the fiction categories of the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and the Nga Kupu Ora Maori Book Awards, and was published in German in 2012 by Walde+Graf. Her short story collection, Forbidden Cities, was a regional finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Prize. She's also the author of YA mystery novels set in haunted cities around the world (published by Scholastic US) and a forthcoming children's book, Hene and the Burning Harbour. 

Paula is well-known here as a fiction writer, but I’ve also long admired her insightful and intelligent literary interviewing, on show most years at the Auckland Writer’s and Reader’s Festival. It was on her trip home for this that I persuaded her to teach on a writing course for migrant women I run, New Kiwi Women Write Their Stories. This is a four-week ‘fast and furious’ tour through poetry, fiction, editing and performance, and the women are invited to contribute to an anthology at the end, launched (with afternoon tea of course!) as the finale.

A number of well-known writers have been tutors, and they are invited to be in the anthology too. Imagine my pleasure and surprise when Paula sent me the poem above. This poem, which starts with the familiar phrase (to many) “Where are you from,” is packed full of witty detail: the taxi driver who talks about making bread, the nose specialist in Iowa who uses the iconic Australian phrase, “Good on ya.” But the apparently random list is in fact carefully constructed. Everyone, it seems, is from somewhere else. Everyone has multiple allegiances, multiple identities.

In Paula’s poem, the speaker starts by asking the question, but then is in turn asked as she moves around the world. This is a scenario common to us nomadic Kiwis. In fact the answer to that question, “Where are you from,” might well be, “It depends on where I am.” The last verse of Paula’s poem suggests, however, that not all of us are comfortable with the notion of shifting geographies: “He is not from anywhere/but there.”

One of the things I enjoy most about this poem is its cheerful delight, the innocent curiosity with which the question is asked. In the world of the poem, asking where someone is from is a way of connecting. It leads to further opening up and maybe even a exchange: cricket, a dream of trams. I’m going to succumb to temptation and offer a poem I wrote in 2006, ‘From Where’. This is an altogether darker poem, sparked when a camera-toting man stopped me as I was walking in the Auckland Domain (my home turf since student days). To some of us born in NZ, the question “Where are you from,” seems to carry an insinuation of “you don’t belong.” It’s an often daily reminder that we ‘look different’. And yet the way the question is asked (very kindly) means we can’t respond with anything other than polite, as-vague-as-we-can-make-it, murmurings. (Which I did, then went home and wrote this poem.)

I’d love to say that seven years later there is no longer any need to write poems like this; unfortunately I still get asked the same question, and I still feel like I’m being questioned on my right to live at home! My reaction changes, however, as soon as I travel. I find it intriguing that Paula and I responded so differently to the same question. Below, her answers to some questions I sent her; and then, my poem.

What sparked this poem? 
I guess the spark for the poem was my incredible nosiness about where people are from; I'm always asking everyone, including shop assistants and receptionists and people I meet on the tram. (They have trams in Sheffield!) I think I can get away with it, because I'm 'foreign' as well - even in New Zealand, because I don't live there. The material seemed to lend itself to a poem because of its compressed form, so I could play with the juxtapositions a bit. Also, the compression of a poem works because often I get little more than a name of a place from someone: these are often announcements rather than discussions, like the one on the operating table in Iowa!

You're more commonly known as a prose writer, but the confidence of this poem suggests you write poetry quite often. Are you a closet poet? 
Yes, I'm a poet on the sly. The very sly, as I don't have much confidence in my poetry. I still sound like a prose writer, I think. Often I write in syllabic meter to try to constrain my lines more, or to demand more of the word choices. I like the playfulness that's possible in a poem, and also the chance to write about things I see/experience directly, which I can't do in my fiction. 'Where' is the first poem I've had published as an adult, you know, apart from a parodic villanelle (called 'Billanelle') written for Bill Manhire's 60th-birthday book. My very first publication as a child was a poem in the primary school magazine. It was about Guy Fawkes. It began 'Guy Fawkes was an Englishman/He though the government was wrong' and ended with 'And they hanged him.' That's all I remember. Clearly I was a prose writer even back then, and obsessed with history ...

How do you choose what to write about? 
I don't think I choose what to write, exactly, whatever I'm doing. Something comes bubbling up, and won't go away. Sometimes it's a case of a connection or intersections, a few things coming together. A while ago I visited the ruins of Pontefract Castle, where Richard II was killed, and I was thinking about it for a while. Then there was a bad car accident nearby that made national news here in the UK, and it seemed as though these two things were related, tangentially. Place is always important in my fiction, and clearly the interest translates.


From where
by Renee Liang

where are you from
she asked
licking fat cream from the tips
of perfect manicures

and I said
actually I live just around the corner.

no really she said
looking in her handbag for lip gloss
where are you from

and I said
from here
as if I didn’t know what she meant
the first time.

From here?
she said
one perfect eyebrow raised
as if she wanted to redo her eyeliner

and I said
quickly
yes

and I knew
the next question.

oh she said
oh where are your parents from then
and I wanted to say
Disneyland

but I knew she wouldn’t believe me
so I said
China

and I could see her summing me up
origami eyelids
golded skin
straight black hair
flat chest

I could see her
breathing in

in relief.

This week's editor Renee Liang, a second-generation Chinese New Zealander, is a poet, playwright, paediatrician, medical researcher and fiction writer. She is involved in organising community arts events such as artistic blind-dating initiative Metonymy and Funky Oriental Beats (FOB), a platform for Kiwi-Asian performing artists. She is a regular contributor to The Big Idea, a website linking NZ's arts community. Renee has been published in a number of journals and anthologies and has produced three chapbooks of poetry: Banana, Chinglish and Cardiac Cycle. She has written, produced and toured three plays: Lantern(2009), The Bone Feeder (2009/2011)and The First Asian AB (2011). She is currently working on Paper Boats, a play about the journeys of Chinese-Kiwi women. Website: www.chinglish-renee.blogspot.com

Remember, there are lots of great poems to check out this Tuesday - look at the sidebar!

Surface, by Peter Munro

Swept among seas that walk downwind,
beaks and feathers wheel to hook and pick.
Skimming low, fulmars heel and spin
speed.  Their twines knot the world to its quick.
I learn to listen with my skin.
Gusts kiss me, whispering their cold.
Caressed in tempos that whitecaps kick,
rust scours my vessel, fills her holds.
She presses into a surface nicked
by birds feeding where salt unfolds.

Fulmars chitter.  Kittiwakes yelp.
White streaks the backs of waves as if scars.
Whipped sinuously, like bull kelp
waving down current when the flood spars
with land or the ebbing sea whelps
tide pools upon dried out shorelines,
white betrays the gale where each gust tars
the surface.  I learn to read signs,
brushed scrollwork rolling out so far
meanings merge where whitecaps align.

My trawl leaves the surface behind.
The net descends from the broken backs
of seas through currents the moon aligned
in layers, sinking from black to black.
I tow her where my eyes are blind.
I listen as her sonars call
to my vessel, sending pings and clacks.
A granite outcrop snags her crawl,
strikes her dumb as chains and footgear wrack.
Among fins and gills, silence falls.


Thanks to Seattle poet Peter Munro whose poem 
is posted with his permission. 

—Editor: T Clear

When I asked Peter Munro to send me a poem, I knew that he was up in the vast north on a fishing boat doing research, and thought it a marvelous opportunity to give this post one of the things that I love to do when reading poetry — to place the poet in a landscape relevant to what is being composed. In my humble opinion, this particular landscape is high drama with a bit of the romantic involved. (Although I'm dead certain that Peter would deny any aspect of the romantic notion.)

Over the past few months, at at open mic that I attend, I've listened to Peter read, in sequence, "chapters" of a 31-page poem titled The Baptism of Mack MacListon. After the first few times I heard him read this, I gave up trying to follow the narrative, and instead gave in to the spectacular music of it. At once it's like listening to Debussy blended with Nine Inch Nails. He gave me a hard copy of it a month ago, and I'm slowly making my way through - the music as present on the page as when experienced in a purely auditory fashion.

I also asked Peter to send some words, in addition to his poem, on his location - and he came through, generously. Without further commentary, from the Gulf of Alaska, here's Peter Munro:

My calling is poetry.  However, I am fortunate to have a second calling that allows me to make up for income deficits in the poetry biz.  In my day job, I am a research fisheries biologist.  I love the work.  I am part of a team that contributes to the stewardship of commercially important fish stocks in the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and the Bering Sea.  Specifically, we contract with small trawlers to carry teams of researchers out to sea and conduct research fishing according to statistical protocols.  We use our catches to estimate populations of bottom fish such as cod, halibut, flounder, and rockfish.

I was working on this poem when T. Clear asked me to send her a piece to use in Tuesday Poem.  When this poem comes out, I will be nearing the end of a fifty day trip in the Gulf of Alaska, working in the latter two-thirds of a seventy-five day survey that stretches from Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands, to Ketchikan, in Southeast Alaska.  We send the trawl down to the bottom 5 to 7 times a day.  It takes about an hour to fish then one to three hours to process each catch into data plus additional time for managing data, tending to fishing gear, and making fishing decisions with the captain.

Once the vessel’s crew have dumped the catch into our sorting table, we more or less do everything else by bending our backs, hoisting and shoving a lot of 30 kilogram baskets of fish.  We sort by species, weigh, count, dissect to determine sex ratios, measure lengths, take certain body parts for determining the age, and then conduct a number of other special, more one-off projects.  It is slimy, bloody work.  The crew numbers three on deck working with us and the scientific party numbers six.  We all put our noses into the muck dumped from the cod-end and tease each other till the work is done.

The boat is the F/V Sea Storm, a 123-foot, house-forward, steel trawler built by MARCO in Seattle in 1980, christened as the Doña Genoveva.  She is one of the most beautiful vessels in the North Pacific, though definitely on the small side by modern standards.  Her lines are derived from old-school Norwegian shipwrights, translated through the western combination design developed on the left coast of the USA after engines began to displace sail, and that came into flower during the king crab boom of the 1970s.  She would be too expensive to build today, requiring far too much cold-rolling of steel to produce the curves.  But she rides like a champion, a sweet motion that seems to be completely predictable; no sudden lurches or surprise throws.  Her skipper swears she can take any weather, even though only 123 feet.

Truly the Sea Storm is old school: she was built for fishing, with living-on by humans being a Norwegian afterthought.  The quarters are crammed far, far forward.  I’m living in a room with three other guys with less than a meter between our two stacks of bunks.  We can’t all four stand in the room at the same time, much less get dressed or open a locker.  One of the women in our field party bunks with the cook and the open door to the galley and all the conversations bellowed there over the sound of the main and the generators.  The other woman in our party has her “own” stateroom, smaller than a closet, but it’s where we work up our data so she isn’t really able to be there except after we’ve all gone to bed.  There are twelve people on the boat and a total of ten places to sit down, including the captain’s and pilot’s chairs up in the wheelhouse.

To work on poems, I get up at 4 in the morning, since most of the rest of our company stays in their bunks until 6.  Net goes in the water at 7.  We try to work hard enough to be too tired to notice or care that none of us can sit down without touching another person (usually a being we wouldn’t be inclined to touch at all and especially not this much).  I won’t mention the smell other than to remind you of fresh water rations and weeks of sweat, pollock blood, cod intestines, arrowtooth flounder slime, and shortspine thornyhead scales.  Every day I shrug into my foul weather gear, tromp out on deck, breast up to the sorting table, start slugging fish, and marvel that I’m getting paid to do this beautiful work (said without irony).

The skipper says to mention the fresh fish.  (I have written this in the galley and simply cannot ignore editorial input from my shipmates.)  We do get to eat fresh fish: spot shrimp for lunch today.

The skipper has also grumped at me that there are eleven places to sit down, not ten.  Those eleven seats still feel more like five.

I’ve blithered on this long about research fishing because I love it.  However, poetry is my real gig.  Please visit my web site: www.munropoetry.com

When I’m not at sea I live in a bedroom community to Seattle, Washington, USA, with my wife and our two sons.

---
This week's editor, T. Clear, manages a glass art business in Seattle, producing and shipping work for galleries and gift shops all across the U.S. She has been publishing her work for over 30 years, and her first book-length manuscript, Dusk, is forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press in 2014.     

When you've emerged from the sea-blown world of Peter Munro, please do check out the poems from our thirty Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.   

Copyright details in the sidebar.                                                                                                                                                     

Tika by Saradha Koirala

Goodbye takes the form of a blessing.

My family press tika on our foreheads

rupees into my palm.

Mountain-high through time and air

the red paint dries, the rice grains fall

leaving a trail that could surely lead us home.

But sometimes you can't tell what you've seen

until you close your eyes

and the imprint reveals

an inverted world of darkened brights

and a pale sky

a halo around the ones I'll miss.

Tika stayed with us for each part of the journey

and at last we were hurrying

to our final connection.

Back home I find red smudges on my notebook

like gilt edges of a Bible

indelible tika

staining my most sacred things.

Editor: Harvey Molloy

'Tika' is the final poem from Saradha Koirala's magnificent second book of poems Tear Water Tea. In India and Nepal a tika is a blessing received at the end of a puja ('worship'); the person performing the puja places their forefinger into the dye and makes a single red vertical mark on the recipient’s forehead.  During the puja, offerings are made of light, scent, flowers, rice, and sweets.

I have lived in an Indian family for over twenty-five years and know that to assume that puja is just about 'religion', 'belief', 'worship' -- all very conceptual, very intellectual, and quite slippery, especially in Hinduism and Buddhism  -- is  to miss the event of Tika; Tika marks a passage or transition.  Something is about to change, to journey to become something else and  'Goodbye takes the form of a blessing.' That wonderful line also resonates with me because I share with Saradha, and my wife Latika, and with many others, the 'Goodbye' at the heart of the immigrant experience.  Our families are elsewhere, to visit them is to arrive finally at goodbye as we return to our homes elsewhere.

Saradha's poems often include the experience of a complication.  The visitors leave, the tika drying on their foreheads, but the possibility of remaining lost, even abandoned, without any chance of return comes  through in that ambiguous could surely, with all its German märchen hints of Hansel and Gretel left in the woods. It's not would  nor will.  There's an uncertainty after leave-taking as loved ones pass into memory and it's only in this memory that a recognition can take place: 'But sometimes you can't tell what you've seen.'  'Tell' necessitates the work of poetry -- all of Tear Water Tea remains committed to a sustained reflection on experience. 

How does one measure courage in poetry?  It's a difficult question.  One sign of courage is to remain true, though not unyielding to reflection, to the sense, perhaps even the hunch, of an experience and its value or significance.  This courage means not by necessity or habit adopting a mask (although it’s all a mask in the same way that drama is all characters) or to remove the intensity of the significance through ironic distance (unless irony is integral to the sense or hunch).  

Writing this I am struck by the many words I have at my disposal to name literary tropes and rhetorical figures and the less specific words I find for the special, the unique, the marvellous, the miraculous, the fortuitous, the valued, the spiritual, the 'souled', the sacred: the experience of unique moments that confer value and which are somehow part of a vastness.  The experience of tika lingers and stains the present through memory and this staining is now a hallmark of the 'sacred things.'  The image of the gilded pages of the Bible is both courageous and perfect: the stain is on the edge or margin of sacred things and is bound in some mysterious way with writing and belief. I don’t belong to any religion but I have a hunch that one of the great taboos for many poets of today is faith. 

Zen aficionados might urge us to just live in the moment but Saradha’s poetry suggests that an appreciation of our own experience is not immediately apparent but rather requires memory, reflection, perhaps even the act of writing, to make sense.  Saradha’s work is both personal and thoughtful—there’s much to discover with each reading.

The Poet

Saradha Koirala lives, writes and works in Wellington, New Zealand, and is of Nepali and Pākehā descent. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters and her poetry has been published in The Listener, broadsheet nz, Hue & Cry, Turbine, Sport and Lumiere Reader. She is also a Tuesday Poet who blogs here and her book is available here. 

This week's editor, Harvey Molloy, is a writer and teacher who lives in Wellington. His first book of poems, Moonshot, was published by Steele Roberts in 2008.  He is the current poetry editor of Jaam magazine.

When you've read and enjoyed Tika - do check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar.