Auckland Poetry

She wavers
her dark, pin fist
foiled
her slim, limbless torso
serpentine.
Wordless lips ajar
it stops
in billowing white
it bleeds
where silver trickles
scars from an autumn sky.

Clara’s Christmas :a sentimental verse

(I met Clara when she was 70 and I was 11 we became great ‘chuckle chums’. She had gone into service before WW1 and had many tales to tell.
The poem is about a Christmas visit when she sat happily smiling and I guess dreaming and could not hear us knocking at her door. )

As we looked in through the window at her silent night room
We saw no sign of sorrow or gloom:
Clara chuckling, dreams of happy play,
Cheered by the warm sights of her Christmas Day:
Singing for Uncle Sam, her young voice was a treat
Dancing like joy for her Aunts on tireless feet
Cuddling her Daddy and when she begins to tire
Saying prayers with her sisters and having a last warm at the fire.
Laughing again years later that the night of waiting was away
Helping her nieces unwrap their fun for their Christmas Day
Saying she’d never seen such a pretty doll in her life
Smiling no she’d never wanted to be a wife.
Gasping in their delight at the lights on the tree
Cradling young
Tracy crying because of a cut knee.

The favourite Aunt, they’d never leave but always love
Alone in her room, sat gentle and quiet as a dove.
The often-brought out Christmas cards standing on the shelf;
So much love waiting in one whom never thought of herself.

We knocked and knocked.
She never heard.
Soon she had died,
With so much life and love locked inside.

Decide whom you can visit for the sake of Christmas Day.
Knock louder than we did and don’t go away.
One day you may be old tired and cold.
Let’s hope,

One looking through your window,

Will see you with something warmer

Than old memories to hold.

Your painting
with its floating orange promise
now hangs
neatly varnished
minus one coat
of watermelon red.
Be lonely for me
there are angels.
Inside of you
deep white clocks travelling
with two r’s
& without.

I want to write something for you
something special
but it seems that won’t do.

You were something far beyond us.
Some unreachable star.
Already.
Ten years back - seventeen -
Late nineties.

All of us craved for you.
He did more than I,
he was probably right.
But he died
not from it -
from something closer to what he had always been
- ludicrous -
but not quite
the same.

I want to write something
because I surfed past you a lot lately
and saw how grown-up you are
half smiling
bare naked
in front of cameras
reading your poems
& prose
to audience
everywhere
you go.

I wanted to write something special
but it seems I didn’t. Do
you care if I hate you
now?

He’d written something for you.
Something special.
Something good.
Let’s not the tea go cold -
it was called.

He is cold now
and so are you
lost in the Swiss snow.

First published in Magnapoets - Canada

In a landscape of medieval trees

you are water to dust

lucid transformations

of children
metaphors of Jesus

riding water.

Inky Pinky Pooh
Honey I still love you.
You’re a woven ream
Satisfying all my Dreams
A subject constantly on my mind
It eats away at my time.
When can you be mine?
If it be true, put on your shoes
Nothing more to excuse
For we have nothing more to lose.

Battery Failure.

The owner of a bottle green jaguar had chest pain,
after dinning on Irish stew, bravely drove himself
to hospital, parked, locked his car but forgot to
switch of its light; at the reception hall he collapsed
and the experts in medical emergency went into
action. Later the hospital’s sentinel noticed this, but
could do nothing only watch as the light got dimmer
and finally at five the battery was so weak that
the lights ceased; at the same time as its owner died.
this greatly disturbed the sentinel who thought there
must be a sort of connection even though he lacked
words to express his concern. But he learned a lesson
that morning now he keeps his battery on his own car
topped up and never forget to switch off the lights

The Great Potato Voyage

The ship was so old that she had wooden deck, great to
walk barefoot on when it’s hot; try that on an iron deck
and you get blisters. I was peeling potatoes across
Bay of Biscay, down the coast of Portugal and into
the Mediterranean Sea. The Suez Canal I saw in its early
morning glory while holding on to the peeler, the red sea
and the Persian Gulf I took in sitting down, just had to
take care that the tubers had no eyes, the cook lost his
temper then and shouted all the way across the Indian
Ocean till we docked in Nagasaki, Japan.

Sometimes the ship stopped in the middle of this vastness,
for a rest, and everything went a bit spooky, we whispered
as not to upset unseen forces, like being in a church, no one
swore and our hands were ready to be folded into the act
of preying should a bishop come along. The roaring forties,
only it was a calm day, the captain came told me not to
whistle, laugh aloud or sing, and keep my fingers crossed.
“Will we ever reach the shore”, I said. “You will young man,
but remember this: when you’re old what you will miss
the most is the sea”