This is just to say (Rogelio Guedea)

Until a few months ago, all I knew of Mexican poetry was from a few international names like Octavio Paz, a selection of translations by Samuel Beckett, and a number of fine poets from anthologies. Then my discovery that in fact Spanish American poetry was being written a few kilometres from where I live. Rogelio Guedea has been in Dunedin for almost a decade. He teaches at the university, an intellectual who contributes regular political columns to papers in Mexico, a former legal prosecutor, a writer of crime novels, and a prolific poet. El crimen de los Tepames, the final volume of a fiction trilogy, last year was a best seller in Mexico, and his poetry has won Spain’s Premio Adonais. The enterprising Roger Hickin, whose Cold Hub Press is the only New Zealand imprint that brings out collections in foreign languages, is about to publish Si no te hubieras ido/If only you hadn’t gone, with his own finely pitched translations. The set of thirty four poems was written while the writer’s wife and family was temporarily back in Mexico. As I’ve noted in an Introduction to the volume,

‘Ordinary,’ I expect, is the first word that may come to you, should you ask, what kind of world is this, that these poems are part of? For that is the ultimate grace, you might say, that the poet’s wife bestows on a house and a suburb while she is there, and that seems so distant, so unlikely, when she is not. Just as in the Adam myth it is the correct naming of things that brings orderliness to whatever exists, it is her physical presence that gives coherence to objects, and pattern to routines. This is not ‘domestic poetry’ of the kind that sometimes seems to me a mere cataloguing of trivia. This is poetry that addresses love and purpose and emotional reach, and where everything within their range, whether cakes of soap or bathplugs or plastic rubbish bags, bask in their sheer quiddity, as philosophers used to say, because finally it is love that sanctions whatever point they have. This is the poetry of love timed to the minute by mundane clocks, yet proposing so much more as it spells out with casual, anecdotal, wryly good-humoured largesse, that right here, and only here, life and its values take shape.’

Rogelio Guedea

If you’re inclined to trace out lines of descent, you might follow the thread from William Carlos Williams’ note in ‘This is just to say,’ when he took plums from an icebox, and wrote the sort of poem that several of my contemporaries fancied was where modern personal poetry really began, to the note on the fridge door in a Dunedin suburb, in the first lines of If only you hadn’t gone. At least it places these new poems in a tradition of unshowy, unsentimental love poems, whose strength is their needing neither flourish nor elaboration to strike home. And as I very much liked having the chance to say as I wrote about Guedea, ‘I don’t know any other poetry written in New Zealand that does quite what these poems do, with their imperative of rapidly jotted notes, and yet that overarching confidence of sustaining form. I don’t believe we can any longer talk about our contemporary poetry at large, without Rogelio Guedea now being a voice in that conversation.’

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Si no te hubieras ido

I (28-10-2013)

vi la nota que me dejaste adentro
del refrigerador, sobre el queso italiano,
todavía empaquetado:
son las mismas notas que me has dejado
siempre cuando te vas, puedo reconocer
tu pulso, verte escribiéndola, incluso,
de espaldas a mí, con tu mano
precipitada/ es, sin embargo, como
si fuera la primera nota que me dejas
cuando te vas, siempre que la leo
me encuentro contigo por primera vez,
la leo e inmediatamente te miro subiendo al avión,
disolviéndote entre el tumulto de gente/
nunca quito las notas del lugar donde
las dejaste, me gusta volver a ellas
de vez en vez, durante el día, principalmente
antes de entrar en la cama:
sólo entonces tengo la certeza
de que no te has ido.

I saw the note you left
in the fridge, on top of the Italian cheese,
still in its wrapper:
the sort of note you always leave me
when you go, I can tell
your firm hand, can even see you writing it,
hurriedly, with your back to me/ but it’s
as if it’s the first time you’re leaving
me a note when you go, every time I read it
I’m right back there with you,
I read it and straight away I see you boarding the plane,
disappearing in a horde of people/
I never shift the notes from where
you leave them, I like to come back to them
now and then, throughout the day, mostly
just before I go to bed:
only then can I convince myself
you haven’t gone.

VII (3-11-2013)

duermo en el lugar vacío que dejaste
al otro lado de la cama:
me mudé la siguiente noche que te fuiste/
tuve la impresión de que se hundía la cama sin ti
y de algún modo tenía yo que llenar ese hueco
que se abría con las horas/
ahora leo con la luz de tu lamparita, apoyo la cabeza
en tu almohada, siento la suavidad de la sábana
y, de vez en cuando, como haces tú, volteo hacia un lado
para ver el espacio que suelo ocupar cuando estás,
lo veo vacío, como un agujero que se alargara
hacia el sótano de la casa, oscuro, infranqueable:
podría extender la mano para salvarlo,
traerme de nuevo a mi sitio,
pero me dejo así, vacío y oscuro,
solo y, ya lo sabes,
cayendo.

I sleep in the empty space you left
on the other side of the bed:
I moved the night after you left/
the bed seemed to sag without you
and somehow I had to fill the hollow
that was growing by the hour/
now I read by the light of your lamp, resting my head
on your pillow, feeling the softness of the sheet
and now and then, as you do, I turn on my side
so I can see the space I usually occupy when you’re here,
it’s empty, like a hole that stretches
down towards the basement, dark and untraversable:
I could reach my hand out to save it,
draw myself back to my own spot,
but I’m still here, dark and empty,
alone and, as you’re well aware by now,
falling.

X (6-11-2013)

estoy escuchando a marco antonio solís
quien canta:
“el frío de mi cuerpo pregunta por ti y no sé dónde estás
si no te hubieras ido sería tan feliz”/
ya lo sabes
la hemos escuchado muchas veces
pero nunca supe muy bien lo que decía marco antonio solís
hasta ahora que lo escucho y tú no estás
porque no es lo mismo escucharla cuando estás que cuando
te has ido,
así que la he escuchado una vez más
dos o tres
más
porque hay canciones de marco antonio solís que son así
uno las escucha muchas veces pero no las entiende hasta
que tú no estás:
hasta qué tú no estás.

I’m listening to marco antonio solís
who is singing:
“my cold body asks for you and I don’t know where you are
if only you hadn’t gone I’d be so happy”/
you remember
we listened to it over and over
but I never really knew what marco antonio solís meant
until listening to him now without you
because it’s not the same song when you’re here
as when you’ve gone,
and so once more I’ve listened to it
two or three times
more
because marco antonio solís’s songs can be like that
one can listen many times and not understand them until
you’re not here:
until you’re not here.

XIII (9-11-2013)

no te lo había dicho pero
por primera vez en nueve años que
tengo viviendo en esta isla no me
siento solo:
tengo debajo de los pies una red que me sostiene,
amigos queridos —sebas, andrea, juan, fernanda, vero, mario, mariana, carlos, isoli—
que traigo siempre deambulando en la cabeza,
piando como los pajarillos del amanecer, tú sabes lo lindo
que cantan en la mañanas/
pensarlos es ir acompañado, recordarlos es levantar
un muro o contrafuerte: no que me inviten a comer,
no que me llamen por teléfono —yo nunca creí que alguien me llamaría algún día
por teléfono para preguntarme cómo estoy—,
la amistad no está ahí sino en su reverso:
no está en que te piensen sino en pensarlos,
no está en que te recuerden sino en recordarlos/
para un solitario como yo
(que rehúye, ya lo sabes, a todos y a todo), estos pensamientos
y recuerdos de los amigos queridos es algo nuevo,
una isla nueva,
un cielo azul despejado nuevo,
lindo como el canto del pajarillo que me abre la ventana
todas las mañanas para invitarme a caminar otro día,
otra niebla,
arder sobre otra zarza/
ya sé que mientras esto escribo tú duermes, allá, del otro lado del mundo,
y por eso lo hago, sólo para ver si nos encontramos en alguna esquina
de alguno de tus sueños: again.

I haven’t told you this but
for the first time in the nine years
I’ve been living on this island
I don’t feel alone:
I’m supported by a network of dear friends
—sebas, andrea, juan, fernanda, vero, mario, mariana, carlos, isoli–—
they’re always wandering through my mind,
chirping like birds at daybreak, you know the loveliness
of their morning songs/
to think of them means company, to recall them is to raise
a wall or buttress: it’s not that they invite me to dinner,
nor that they ring me up to check on how I am,
—I wasn’t expecting that would ever happen,—
the friendship doesn’t work that way but in reverse:
not that they think of you but rather that you think of them,
not that they remember you but you remember them/
for someone on his own like me
(who, as you know, shies away from everyone and everything),
these thoughts and memories of dear friends are something new,
a new island,
a new blue cloudless sky,
lovely as the song of the little bird that every morning
summons me to throw the window open and face another day,
another fog,
another journey through another gorse bush/
I know you’re asleep while I’m writing this,
there on the other side of the world,
that’s why I do it, just to see if we might bump into each other
in some corner of your dreams: otra vez.

XXV (21-11-2013)

¿has escuchado "mi casa nueva"?
la cantan los invasores de nuevo león,
ayer la escuché en la noche antes de dormir,
puse la radio en mi celular
y la estaban cantando los invasores:
¿la has escuchado?
dice:
“a veces lloro muy cerca de las botellas/
especialmente cuando me acuerdo de ti”
y luego, más adelante, dice:
“si amanece no se miran las estrellas/
y oscurece y nunca brillan para mí”
seguro la has escuchado, empieza
así:
“te escribí una carta y no me contestaste”/
me llegó me llegó cuando lo escuché,
son los invasores, dije, por eso no cambié de estación,
la estuve escuchando antes de dormir
en la radio de mi celular, con los audífonos y
la luz apagada,
lo mejor fue esa parte que rasga cualquier vestidura,
mira, te la transcribo:
“una radiola y dos amigas me acompañan/
mi casa nueva muy distinta a las demás/
tiene un letrero de color en la vidriera/
y una cualquiera es la que ocupa tu lugar”
ya sé que eso de “una cualquiera es la que ocupa
tu lugar” te va a molestar,
pero tú sabes que yo creo en las consejas populares,
y la mía dice: un perdido a todas va.

have you heard “my new house”
by the invaders of nuevo león?
last night I listened to it before I went to sleep,
I turned my cellphone radio on
and the invaders were singing it:
have you heard it?
it goes:
“sometimes when I remember you/
I weep among the bottles”
then, further on:
“at dawn the stars are nowhere to be seen/
at dusk they don’t come out for me”/
you must have heard it, it starts
like this:
“I wrote you a letter and you didn’t reply”/
it touched me touched me when I heard it,
that’s the invaders I said, and didn’t change the station,
I was listening to it before I went to sleep
on my cellphone radio headphones
with the light off,
best of all was where it sounds like clothing’s being torn,
here, I’ll write it down for you:
“two lady friends and a jukebox keep me company/
my new house is nothing like the others/
with a bright sign in the window/
and a certain woman in your place”
I know that “certain woman
in your place” will bother you,
but you know how I believe in popular sayings,
and one of mine goes: a desperate man grabs what he can.

XXIII (19-11-2013)

te estropeé la toallita que usamos
para secarnos las manos/ como se me cayó
un poco de agua en el suelo y otro poco de salsa,
limpié con la toallita amarilla —la que compramos
en el Just Two Dollars—, pero intenté exprimirla y seguía húmeda,
así que se me ocurrió coger la toallita
del secamanos —la que tú misma bordaste allá en México—,
pero con la salsa se estropeó toda/
en la tienda de los chinos vi una igualita a la tuya
que me costó tres dólares.
el chino me aseguró que es más original que las que borda
la gente a mano, allá en México:
verás que no notarás la diferencia

I’ve ruined the little towel we use
to dry our hands/ when I spilled
water then salsa on the floor
I wiped them up with the yellow cloth —the one we bought
at the Just Two Dollars—, but it wouldn’t squeeze out properly,
and when I grabbed the hand towel
—the one you embroidered back in Mexico—,
the salsa ruined it/
at the Chinese shop I saw one much the same
which cost three dollars.
the Chinese guy swore it was more authentic
than the hand-embroidered Mexican ones:
you’ll see, you’ll never know the difference.

XXVIII (24-11-2013)

los arbolitos de durazno y mandarina
los he traído a la habitación nuestra/
pensé que no los plantaste a propósito
y que te gustaría que los tuviera en mi habitación,
junto al espejo que habríamos querido que fuera de luna/
se ven hermosas sus ramas invadiendo la habitación,
ya han tapado media pantalla del televisor
y ahora me cuesta ver el box los martes en la noche.
seguramente no darán fruto hasta que vuelvas.

I’ve brought the young mandarin
and peach trees into our bedroom/
I thought you might have left them unplanted on purpose
and be pleased I have them in the room with me,
next to the mirror (we’d wanted a moon-mirror)/
their branches look lovely invading the room,
already they’re halfway across the tv screen
and now it’s hard to watch the tuesday night boxing.
surely they won’t fruit before you’re back.

XXXIII (29-11-2013)

me han preguntado si realmente
te has ido: que porque te han encontrado
en el jardín botánico, que porque te han visto salir del supermercado,
que porque te saludaron a la salida del cine, que porque
se cruzaron contigo en las escaleras eléctricas del Meridian/
les he dicho que no, es decir que sí te has ido,
¿y cuándo es que volverá, entonces?, me han insistido,
en cualquier momento, mañana o pasado,
hoy mismo quizá, contesto:
pero ellos saben que les he mentido.

people ask me if it’s true
you’ve gone: since they’ve come across you
in the botanic gardens, seen you coming out of the supermarket,
waved to you leaving the cinema,
passed you on the escalators in Meridian Mall/
no! I say, in other words yes you’ve gone,
and when will she be back? they keep on asking,
any time now, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,
perhaps even today, I reply:
but they know I’m lying.

---

Meinenung K. Kunthee

While we have the freedom to write and publish as we like, it's worth remembering - yet again - what a rare right this is for many contemporary writers. One of these was the Thai poet and political activist, Meinenung K. Kunthee. Known as 'the People's Poet', he was murdered on 23 April. PEN International has called for an official investigation, which seems unlikely. Other writers and commentators are currently under threat in Thailand.

Poetry by Riemke Ensing

A Voice of Her Own

A long time ago I made the point in an anthology introduction, that trying to yoke poets into some kind of ‘tradition’ or ‘order of descent’ might seem a tempting thing to do, but it could also be a heavy-handed muting of particular voices. I should have made far more of a point of it. What poets don’t have in common seems to me far more interesting to listen to than what they do. Similarly, the traces that come through from other places or cultures, or the cast of mind poets don’t share, are more decisive and worth attending to than simply the fact of their living in the same country. Riemke Ensing’s poetry, over several decades, has carried the kind of strong independent voice that bears this out, as vigorously aware now as it ever was of the background she shares with few other New Zealand writers, yet as attentive and attuned to what she does have in common. It’s good to hear her as well as read her in this month’s blog, and to know something too of the kind of poetry she admires.

Vincent O'Sullivan

Intimations of Mortality

Only a short while ago, a friend mentioned Tomas Tranströmer – the 2011 Nobel Prize winner considered to ‘be Sweden’s most important poet’. His poems are spare and dark and I immediately took to the title of one of his volumes – The Deleted World – from which these lines from the poem ‘Midwinter’ are taken.

...Ringing tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world,
There is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled over the border...

It is difficult sometimes to know what it is exactly that captures one, but that last line recalled one of the many stories my almost life-long friend and companion once told me of one of his many escapades between France and Spain in the early 50’s when he was a student of the piano at the Paris Conservatoire. He was doing just that – smuggling an old Spaniard across the border back to his homeland. The man died on the journey.

And so a poem suddenly conjures an entirely different world as well as the one in question. And that ‘ringing ice’ for instance, that ‘crack’ – how so very unexpectedly one is back there at the age of ten, in another country, hearing and seeing just that as one falls into the freezing water.

I suppose, because like Webster I have been ‘much pre-occupied with death’, these last few years –the poems I’ve been writing and reading have tended towards trying to make sense of the fact of death. So many friends and family members are no longer here and as one gets older, intimations of mortality increase on an almost daily basis. That is why I am also drawn to the poem ‘After a Death’ by Tomas Tranströmer.

When my partner – how I dislike that so American word that conjures up Stetsons, spurs and John Wayne movies – was dying, the garden was suddenly filled with fantails for three or four days. They were everywhere. Flew against the windows, flittered about under the verandah roof, gathered in great flocks in the bottlebrush trees and finally even came inside. I rang my friend Emilia Oppenheim, wanting a legend, a significance other than death, but she defusingly inclined towards Stein – ‘a bird is a bird is a bird’. She too has now died and a poem is in the making although it is taking its time.

After Bill’s funeral the fantails had gone. Instead great noisy hordes of Tui were darting and cavorting about in the trees. Previously there might have been one or two or even three, but this was a most unusual sight and sound. And because of the flurry of black feathers and white collars you couldn’t but make a connection with musicians dressed up in concert gear. Here is the poem I wrote some years later.

It won the 2012 NZSA Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition.

---

A different kind of Hemingway episode

after reading ‘There Is Never Any End to Paris.’

[For my friend and companion Bill Trussell, 1920-2009]

Conditions for writing could not have been more dangerous.
There was the year you died
and then another and another year.
Everything froze over.
Grief was deep and nothing seemed bound to earth.
Whole hillsides came down in a rush.
I hardly wrote at all
but stars were close and very bright
lucent through the open window
as though death were normal and every day
without this desperation or desire.

There was wind too and rain
and much silence being solitary.

And all the time there were birds.
The trees full of them, and the garden.
Musicians in white ties, fiercely fast,
chatting, whistling, making passes at each other
as though it were spring and not this depth of winter
with life almost at standstill.

---

The blackbird of Glanmore

And then, just recently re-reading Seamus Heaney, there’s another bird poem.

That ‘shadow on the raked gravel’, that ‘blue light’ in the ‘midwinter’ have a worrying resonance. Is it significant that these particular poems appear at the end of each respective volume? Heaney too has gone and ‘the world is now a different place’ as Marco Sonzogni so movingly pointed out at his session about the art of translation at the New Zealand Writers Week Festival in Wellington recently when he took out a framed photograph of Seamus Heaney and put it on the table in front of him on the podium. They had worked together and become friends and poignantly we too were included in that privilege.

I peruse Heaney’s many volumes on my shelves. Some are first edition hardbacks given to me over the years by my friend Dorothy Howie. All are treasures and there is much to engage the mind and heart. I read his magnificent translation of Beowulf particularly – aloud – as performance – and I think of all the people I’ve known who have died and for whom I would have loved to build a great pyre, Heaney included.

...On a great height they kindled the hugest of all
Funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
Billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
And drowned out their weeping, wind died down
And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
Burning it to the core...

How much more magnificent a rite than our paltry and stereotypical ways.

In the year that Bill died, I was asked to put together a set of poems for the Charles Brasch [founding editor of Landfall] Centennial, by Donald Kerr, Keeper of the Books at the University of Otago Special Collections Library. One of the poems I wrote for that volume was the title poem ‘O lucky man’. I had seen some of Brasch’s diary entries, and the last one, written on May 6, 1973 (he died a few days later on the 20th) seemed to me quite amazing, ‘seven or eight little poems since turning on the light’.

---

O lucky man

[for Charles Brasch]

Eight or nine small poems for breakfast, you record.
O lucky man! Here it’s a wonder
there’s any writing at all with the light slowly failing
and such clouds inexorably dark across the moon.

Rilke had one of his characters admit to maybe ten good lines
at the end of a long life. It has to be better than that
but every day the horizon is closing in –
‘life’ and ‘art’ – the two unequal parts of the equation
never finding the balance to make that perfect symmetry.

This morning though, three blackbirds
at the bowl of persimmons on the outside table.
Poem enough itself
and a Chinese painting to break the fast.

I have always been drawn to the Chinese poets and Japanese Haiku and to the visual, particularly. Yeats continues to be heard. I hear him in the garden when I’m planting my bean rows and thinking of honey bees. And who could forget his ‘two women, both beautiful, one a gazelle.’ But I always go back to Eliot, and more particularly his Four Quartets, which I first heard read as a first year student at Ardmore Teachers’ College in 1957. It was the first English lecture of the year. A tall man leaned into the open door jamb and flicked a book out of the back of his corduroys. He started to read. He read for a long time. Nobody stirred. We were mesmerized. I don’t think anyone understood a word of what was being read, but we were transported by the rhythm, the music, the whole newness and strangeness of it. Somehow we knew it was great, that it was important and had much to come to grips with and would be amazing. And it was, and continues to be. When I read lines from ‘East Coker’ and ‘Little Gidding’ I get revitalized with a kind of energy and courage. I mean if Eliot was struggling, my smaller, and in the larger picture, insignificant attempts at making sense of language, and the world, are easier to put in perspective.

For us there is only the trying.

Riemke Ensing

Poetry by Diana Bridge

The Laureate blog's current guest is a poet I very much admire. Diana Bridge has had five volumes published by Auckland University Press, and is also a Chinese scholar. Here she pays tribute to a favourite English writer, translates a classic Chinese poem, and posts three of her new poems.

I

Several years ago I was introduced to Geoffrey Hill's marvellous poem 'The Peacock at Alderton'. At the time I had been raiding the Wellington Public Library for Hill's small volumes. Though his topics were sometimes frustratingly recondite, and a poem's sense often hard won, what kept me reading was Hill's blend of compressed lyricism and hard-hitting observation. I particularly loved the way he jumped between registers, the demotic strength of his language allied to the loveliness of so many lines.

One of the things that had attracted me in Hill's work was glimpses of a poet-narrator who stands at an angle to the poem's high, sometimes angry, sometimes anguished, moral seriousness. In the poem below, that self takes up more of the stage. The poet-narrator welds together a variously-sourced identity, one that is wrested from improbable combinations, intricately balanced. As the poem goes on, that constructed self continues to stalk lines of apparently pure description: Hill's magnificently observed peacock feathers. And, when feathers morph into bird and the poem lifts into an account of the peacock of the title, the writer self continues to shadow it, the conflation clinched, right at the end of the poem, with the mention of the peacock's voice, his occasional scream.

The Peacock at Alderton

Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
latter acknowledgement: the self that counts
words to a line, accountable survivor
pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,
less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel
to Prospero's own knowledge. In my room
a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt
to describe them, as if for evidence
on which a life depends. Except for the eyes
they are threadbare: the threads hanging
from some luminate tough weed in February.
But those eyes – like a Greek letter,
omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;
like a shaved cross-section of living tissue,
the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,
the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,
the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.
The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine
at the garden end, in blustery twilight
his fulgent cloak stark as a warlock's cape,
the maharajah-bird that scavenges
close by the stone-troughed, stone terraced, stone-ensurfed
Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.

Geoffrey Hill (2007) | Listen to The Peacock at Alderton

Some time later, I gave in to the urge to respond to what I had read of the corpus of this towering poet, and to sum up in a poem something of its effect on me:

Prospero’s stones

I have thumb-printed your last volume.

Here are incantations. Satisfactions struck
in half-line lengths, driven phrases that lap
around each other. I shiver as they bind.
Here are the peacock’s screams at evening:
harsh as the santoor, refined as a high
high string, dashing the face of 'we shall,
tee-tum, live happy ever after' with a splash
of anguish. Here stones are scored with
a prophet’s bloody one-eyed censure.
Release me from their charge? You will not.
Yet see them, often as not, fracked into
lyric slices or, hollowed to catch rainfall,
cupping reflections of untainted beauty.
Then there are some – I would say hallowed
but let it be soft-cornered by acceptance,
where all that we expected was late stubborn grief.

(Published PN Review, December, 2011)

II

In the 1980s, I read a lot of Chinese classical poetry and finished up the decade writing a dissertation on one of the formative aspects of regulated verse, the verse form perfected in the Tang (618-907), and regarded as the apogee of classical poetry. While I was writing my thesis in Hong Kong, poems of my own began to float into my head, probably as a gesture of rebellion against the court language with which I struggled every day. Thirty years on, at the instigation of a far better scholar than I, Peter Harris, I am beginning to collaborate with him on the translation of a selection of favourite classical Chinese poems.

I offer here a translation of perhaps the most famous classical Chinese poem written in a husband's voice, that of Du Fu (712-770), to the wife from whom he was separated. The background to this poem is of civil war, detention and separation. It is probable that it was written around the time of the full moon that marks the Mid-Autumn Festival, which Chinese families traditionally celebrate together with moon-cakes, wine and gazing at the moon. In September of 756 Du Fu had been captured by rebel soldiers and detained in the capital, Chang'an.

A moonlit night

Tonight there is a full moon in Fuzhou.
My wife will watch it on her own.
Away from them, my thoughts are with my children,
Themselves too young to understand, or miss me in Chang'an.
A scented mist has wet her mass of hair.
In the clear moonlight her jade-white arms are cold.
When shall we two lean in the open window,
Light drying up the joint tracks of our tears?

III

Three new poems

Camellia Gully

Within days the lime that canopies the left side
of the valley has thinned into a parasol. Its greens
and pale yellows are the shades of summer – the way
we feel, against expectation. The season is autumn;
autumn has much to recommend it – runs on the board,
for one thing, although the tree is drier, bonier and its raised
bark splits. You could wring the symbolism out of that.
Next up, a drift of outsize spangles, as the wind shakes
into frenzy all the glossy bushes, those subspecies
that lie together in Camellia Gully. And now the tree
is given over to gold. It is still dressed, still itself.
Let it be true, we whisper, for the rest of life.

When the tree opens

The pine tree halts, like a spine on the brink of parting,
and lets you into its world. You look up into the hollow
where, keen to see biology reflected, you spot,
sheathed in that tough cable stretched across its mouth,
the great rope of the cauda equina, the pine's plait of nerves.
Further in, concealed below a fluff of lichen that wraps
the opening's corrugated lip, you glimpse in layers
of assorted wood the shelves of a whole library.
Before the scene has time to settle, shelves convert to lines,
the lines of a single poem: a free verse composition
braced with an armature of rhyme so cunningly implanted
no one twigs. And so you stretch it to the limit,
your way of seeing. It takes a spider to re-route you.
Unmoved by anything you see, or strain to see,
it struggles to complete its mortal mission. As it sways
across the chasm, it traps you in its glittering rigging,
hooking you on a wonder not of your own making,
entangling you in passions set far outside yourself.

Is there anything to match it?

When it appears, its arc spanning the harbour,
and there it lies in all its braided brilliance, everyone
talks colour. Is there anything, they ask, to match it?
I think about the course the rainbow takes: one foot
grounded in the moment, its unmoored trunk sways
upwards, light as longing, before its weight tips it
into a U-turn; then comes the symmetry of its descent,
when it is down, down, if not to earth, it must end
somewhere; its hoop is like a circuit of the mind,
taking you to the edge of the universe and back.
A poem ends in human arms. The rainbow
is a flyover to anywhere you wish. But for that,
I’d say of all things it is closest to a poem – up to,
and including, the moment of its dream-like fade.

Strangers on a World Poetry Day

Fleur Adcock, the Auckland born; now UK resident poet, editor, and translator recently celebrated her 80th birthday, and for World Poetry Day we would like to acknowledge her contribution to the world of poetry.

The British poet Fiona Sampson in a Guardian review of Adcock’s 2013 collection Glass Wings observed:

Like her fellow New Zealander [Katherine Mansfield], Adcock is a literary writer in her limpid, apparently artless style and the precise emotional intelligence of her observations. It's a technique whose ambition is revealed, as was Mansfield's, in its modernising effect. Informality and immediacy are vivid ways to remake a world; and Adcock's style has not dated in the half-century since her debut.

Here, as an instance of Adcock’s 'informality and immediacy' is her reading of 'Strangers on a Tram' from the 2010 collection Dragon Talk.

Jasmine Revolution Poem

One of the luxuries of living in a decent democracy is the liberty to be embarrassed by most contemporary political poetry. Poetry has become so polite we are even a touch wary of being reminded that words are so easily there for the taking. No one is trying to tell us which ones we can use, which ones we can't. If no one needs to keep us quiet, then why on earth would we feel we're at risk? But there are dozens of countries where poets pay a price for not accepting that the word-hoard of language belongs only to a few. One of the things a laureate blog might do is at least to show we know about such writers. There’s solidarity even in that. And it doesn’t much matter whether they are good writers or mediocre ones or even less. Translation barriers usually prevent us from being able to judge. But aesthetic judgments are not what most matter to them. What does, is to be part of a world where language is not claimed to be the possession of political elites.

Mohammed-al-Ajani, a thirty eight year old Qatari, the father of four children, did not respect the regime that governed him, and that he had no part in choosing. He said so in a poem, a straightforward statement that had none of the subtlety say of Mandelstam's famous poem on Stalin that took him to the camps. In one sense it was the broadest kind of 'banner poetry'. But he read it aloud, and was sentenced to fifteen years solitary confinement, for conspiring against the state. This is part of his 'Jasmine Revolution Poem,' translated by Abu-zeid.

When we lay blame
only the base and the vile suffer from it;
and when we praise
we do it with all our hearts.
A revolution was kindled with the blood of the people

tell them in a shrouded voice, a voice from the grave,
tell them that tragedies precede all victories.

This question that keeps you up at night –
it won’t be found
on any of the official channels. . . .
Why, why do these regimes
import everything from the West –
everything but the rule of law, that is,
and everything but freedom?

Let us entrust entirely to the gods

Thanks to a chance enquiry about Greek writing on papyrus, two previously lost poems by Sappho have been uncovered. Oxford's Dr Obbink has shared his findings and the texts online, and they're raising a stir.

Metafilter user Bromius quickly provided a rough translation (have a read of the thread – there's already another translation and some great conversation about their choices):

[Several missing stanzas]

But you always prattle on that Charazon is coming
With a full ship: Zeus, I think,
And all the gods know this, and you
Must not think about it.

You must, rather, send me off and order me
To pray many things to Queen Hera:
That Charazon, sailing his boat
Arrive here

And find us safe and sound. The rest
Let us entrust entirely to the gods:
For fair weather can arise suddenly
From a great storm:

Those for whom the King of Olympus
Wishes a spirit as a helper with troubles,
They become happy
And greatly blessed.

And if Larichos ever lifted his head
And became a man,
He would free us, too,
From very great despair.

Undoubtedly translations are being worked up all over the internet. Please add a link in the comments if you find one you like.

---

Vincent's Version of Sappho

A version of the last Sappho discovery a few years ago appeared in Vincent's Blame Vermeer in 2007.

Version of Sappho

Make the most of it while you can,
my girls- of what the Muses give you,
the splendid fashions they pass on,
the lyre in your hands this moment.
I've a different story. The old always have.
This hair - of course it was black.
My heart wasn't always this despondent.
I once danced with the best of them,
'like a fawn', as we say. Now just standing's
the problem!
                           Here's a moral for you.
Dawn with her famously lovely arms
once carried off Tithonus - should you want
the man's name - to the ends of the earth.
Once there she figured he was hers for good.
That's how handsome she thought him, how
he caught her breath. And yet age, oh yes,
age took even him, the same age
that cripples me. And what if the woman
who loved him, who carried him off,
was immortal? As if it matters, in the end.
He is still dead, Tithonus.

from Blame Vermeer, Victoria University Press, 2007.

Poetry by Michael Harlow

"In the company of map makers you are one"

It seems to me that one of the best things to do with a Laureate blog is to give air time to a fellow poet one admires – as I do now with Michael Harlow. And what better time to do it, with his taking part in Writers and Readers Week next month in Wellington, and the publication shortly of Sweeping the Courtyard, his selected poems, due from Cold Hub Press. A collection of his love poems, Heart absolutely I can, will also shortly appear from the recently established Makaro Press in Wellington.

My own regard for his work is put in a jacket note for that volume, where I recall first reading him soon after he settled here back in the 1970s, when 'his impact had much to do with the distance between what anyone else here was interested in doing, and his going about his own poetry in a way that seemed both singular and confident.' That, even more so, is my view when I now read him at length in his Selected Poems, and recall his own credo – 'the rich delight' as he calls it, of a poet's 'looking out and listening-in for a language to say something about how mysterious we are to ourselves and to the world.'

Photo by the Otago Daily Times.

As well as his own poems, I’ve asked him to choose three of his favourite poems by other writers – one is by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who died in 1549, another by Wallace Stevens, published over ninety years ago, and the third by Emma Neale, from her 2012 collection, The Truth Garden.

---

The company of map makers

In the company of map makers you are one.
   When you lay out the world there are no
straight lines. There is only clamouring for it
   in occluded offices where high words plump
for the 'straight and narrow', and are bluster.

   The only rule that's truly to itself is clear:
turn, and follow the stories. And the stories inside
   them is what map makers do. To know how
mind’s thought feels its way through dark,
   and the light of the dark. To see what it feels like

to follow earth's curve the shape of what you
   imagine, and are imagined by. An art to make
any surprise a wonder. There is laughter buried
   here. To follow the song of hurrying water,
to recall the 'river of rivers' rushing to the sea
   to lose its name, then returning to take another.

In word-struck lines of optic infatuation you are
   mapping the territory to make the invisible, visible.
To know how the imposing impossible is possible,
   when it is like this: 'the air is full of flying children';
and trees are so musical they are always scoring
   'harmonies of a heaven'. And to know the turbulence

of women, and then their quietude – is to find a place
   to be, and being what is in us to attain. When you say
there is no one thing naturally alone on either side
   of the great divide – to map that, is no sophistical aside.
That finally you would like to 'die with life'. And to know
   today’s map is tomorrow the same, but always different.

– Michael Harlow

---

They Flee From Me

Read "They Flee From Me"

– Thomas Wyatt

---

All about the world

Last week
my friend’s daughter Cassandra
asked me in a small voice of wonder,
if I wouldn’t mind could I tell her
all about the world?

Today she
telephoned and said I’m going to tell you
about yesterday and about poetry, too,
since they had been hearing poetry at school

Uh huh, I said
because I couldn’t think of anything else
to say, and besides it had been hard work
not telling her all about the world

She said then
lowering her voice, letting me in on a big
one, Poetry is when words sing. And then she
added since she was in that kind of hurry
to catch up with tomorrow

About one hundred years
from now trees will be called very important
people. I could hear that already she knew enough
of all about the world to keep her singing.

– Michael Harlow

---

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Read "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"

– Wallace Stephens, read by Tom O'Bedlam

---

Today is the piano’s birthday

        Today is the piano’s birthday. Yesterday it was found weeping
in the garden. Mother was not there, father was gone. But today
is the piano’s birthday...

        Under the balalaika tree the children touch it. The piano’s
foot-pedals hum.

        Hurrah! shout the children. The piano is on holiday! They sing
the birthday song. They bound up and down. They strike the exact
note without looking, without looking the piano writes a song for
the children...

        Plinking, planking, plonk – the piano conducts the children through
a small wood of ivory. The children sing with their feet. They call
to mother who is dreaming on the lawn, to father who is at the office
polishing his machines...

        The piano falls into a dream. The children listen. From far off,
birds with the faces of women enter the garden. They lie down.
They call to the children. The children listen. They lean into
the darkness. They decide. They curl inside the piano’s birthday.
The children are the size of a crotchet. The piano grows around them.

        The piano is being dreamed. The children are the stories.
They are listening... to mother wake on the lawn and touch the space
around her... to father close the office door...

        And today is the piano’s birthday.

        If we listen – we can hear mother call them, we can hear father
enter the house, carefully. If we listen – we can hear the very first
song the children sing, the very first dream the piano dreams...
we can hear... mother and father touch each other with wonder...

– Michael Harlow

---

On the death of a daughter

Nowadays often he finds himself down at the river
with fishing rods and home-made lures
that dance as colour-drenched and flamboyant
as an opera diva’s earrings
though the gear, and the catch (if any) aren’t the point.

He goes because he has to.
Because sometimes a twig floats by,
or a bird jags past,
or a dragonfly balances
on thin air.

And it’s -
            he cannot finish what it is.

Yet in this still room
we feel the river move on and on
as if there were comfort
in something pushing forward from its source,
always forward,
light gleaming on its surface instant after instant,
each sudden vision – leaf, water-beetle, seed-pod -
a match that is struck against a deep-running dark.

– Emma Neale

Poetry by Jennifer Compton

A word from Vincent

The obvious point of this site is to celebrate and present the breadth of experience and formal variety that poetry embraces. I shall be inviting a guest poet to contribute work of their own, and to select a poem by a living writer they value, as well as a poem from an earlier era that continues to matter to them.

The first guest poet is Jennifer Compton, a New Zealander who has lived for many years near Melbourne, and was back in Wellington as the resident writer at the Randell Cottage in 2010. She was the winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award for her collection, This City, mostly written while at the cottage, and published in 2011 by Otago University Press.

Most of these blogs will also speak of a poet who is or has been punished or persecuted as a writer for refusing to accept the constraints imposed by a regime or a government threatened by creativity and independent thought. The present blog celebrates the Ghanaian Kofi Awoonor, who was among those killed in a terrorist attack in a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, last September, on the day he was scheduled to read at a literary festival.

"Across a New Dawn"

Sometimes, we read the
lines in the green leaf
run our fingers over the
smooth of the precious wood
from our ancient trees;

Sometimes, even the sunset
puzzles, as we look
for the lines that propel the clouds,
the colour scheme
with the multiple designs
that the first artist put together

There is dancing in the streets again
the laughter of children rings
through the house
On the seaside, the ruins recent
from the latest storms
remind of ancestral wealth
pillaged purloined pawned
by an unthinking grandfather
who lived the life of a lord
and drove coming generations to
despair and ruin

*

But who says our time is up
that the box maker and the digger
are in conference
or that the preachers have aired their robes
and the choir and the drummers
are in rehearsal?

No; where the worm eats
a grain grows.
the consultant deities
have measured the time
with long winded
arguments of eternity

And death, when he comes
to the door with his own
inimitable calling card
shall find a homestead
resurrected with laughter and dance
and the festival of the meat
of the young lamb and the red porridge
of the new corn

*

We are the celebrants
whose fields were
overrun by rogues
and other bad men who
interrupted our dance
with obscene songs and bad gestures

Someone said an ailing fish
swam up our lagoon
seeking a place to lay its load
in consonance with the Original Plan

Master, if you can be the oarsman
for our boat
please do it, do it.
I asked you before
once upon a shore
at home, where the
seafront has narrowed
to the brief space of childhood

We welcome the travelers
come home on the new boat
fresh from the upright tree

(From Promises of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964-2013, by Kofi Anyidoho. Reproduced with the permission of the University of Nebraska Press and the Ghana Poetry Foundation. Copyright 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.)

Kofi Awoonor was also a teacher, a diplomat, an essayist and novelist, and the eminent father-figure of contemporary African poetry in English, although it drew deeply from the singing and oral traditions of his Ewe people. As Wole Soyinka wrote on hearing of his death, he stood against 'corruption of the soul', and 'was imbued with the spirit of ecumenism towards other systems of belief and cultural usages.'

– Vincent O’Sullivan

---

Selected works and selections

"Now You Shall Know" has just won the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2013 – quite a big deal here in Australia, a $12,000 prize – so at the moment it is my favourite poem. Also, I am on a bit of a mission for the shorter poem, and I was well pleased a 52 line poem could win a prize that allows entries up to 200 lines.

Like me, Eric Beach is a New Zealander who is a long time resident of Australia, and I love his affection for his adopted home, and his wry humour, and his laconic, elegant depiction of inland Australia. I have heard perform him this poem and it was a scream, he set the whole house on a roar.

And of course, "Adlestrop". This poem has haunted me ever since I read it, a very long time ago now. Wherein lies its power, its continual magic? I can't explain it. For me, I think it has something to do with the delicious rhyme in the last stanza – mistier and Gloucestershire. But that's not the whole story.

I have written a homage to "Adlestrop"; "Alamein" is from my book This City, published by Otago University Press.

– Jennifer Compton

---

Now You Shall Know

Maria Callas sings the aria 'Voi lo sapete' from Cavalleria Rusticana

The aeroplane is hung in the sky from a clever hook, so we seem
to inhabit a thrumming stillness, but we believe we are travelling

forward. A little this way and a little that way, up and then down
as if we are nosing out a scent. And there is a singing in my ears.

This is cleverness. Recalled from history, the voice of Maria Callas
and the presence of that audience, their rapt surrendering translated

into a thing of monstrous beauty, as she screams, exquisitely, her high
anguish. Or is it our commonwealth of torment? It is, anyway, almost

unendurable. As human as anything is. And everyone present is part
of this. She pauses. She breathes. The orchestra dawdles to intimate

there is a resolution to come. And then he coughs. The man cannot
contain himself a moment longer, the paroxysm erupts. He coughs.

Forever, at this point, he interrupts. Whatever else he did in his life
he coughed and is now part of the story—which I can't follow but

can tell is of dark betrayal and death. And of the tickle in his throat.
But I don't know—non lo so—what it might mean—'Voi lo sapete'.

You it will know? You will come to know it? Now I am being previous.
I am hung in the sky knowing nothing of what I will come to know.

                                                                   *

Held high in the palm of technology's hand, awaiting our delivery
to a runway, a skybridge, a carousel—to our eternal mother, maybe

propping up on the pillows like a bright-eyed dolly. Oh holy dread.
There is nowhere else to sleep this midnight except within her reach.

Believe me. In this house there are no other beds in which I may sleep.
She doesn't whisper stories all night in the dark, her mouth to my ear,

in a language that I used to know, a shuffle of syllables, as if she can
talk me back into her sad, shamefaced arms, snowball's chance of that.

But in the morning when we wake, she laughs, and denounces me as
a blanket thief. A rusted coil has eased. You selfish old woman—I say.

But I am an old woman also. Two old women waking to the new day
that will bring a sudden jolt that is the beginning of the end for her.

I have imagined what I might feel dressing for my mother's funeral,
and as I pinned her lily-of-the-valley brooch to my grey lapel, I knew.

                                                                   *

I have flown in with a book in my clever hand. She loses all feeling
in her left hand. I quit the house to speak to everyone at once. She

is lifted into an ambulance. Something tells me she is about to throw
the performance of her life—her parting shot—the last big push with

everything she’s got. I read that poem—she says—the one about...
ah yes—that one—the one about... we are in the busy corridor of

the hospital close to the grief room. And I know that she will die soon.
This is the hospital where I was born. Once again she reaches for all

her strength and pushes me away from her. I didn’t know—she says.
And that is enough. Go—the voice in my head says—just go. Now.

– Jennifer Compton

---

wimmera roadsong

on the left hand side

               we have the left hand side

& on the right

               we have the right hand side

& a silo straight ahead

flat roads lead to friday night

               they rolled their car & are dead

the wheatfields they are young & green

                               the donald farmer shakes his head

the racecourse is brown in warracknabeal

                               hopetoun streets are red

the lake's dry out of rainbow

               & the cockies

               (that's the birds, not the farmers)

               look well fed

on the left hand side

               we have the left hand side

& on the right

               we have the right hand side

& a silo straight ahead

the barber's sweeping main street

               lest we forget avenue

now the second barber's sweeping main street

                               butcher shops like marble too

yesterday's marked down at the bakery

                               & the river looks like stew

on the left hand side

               we have the left hand side

& on the right

               we have the right hand side

& a silo straight ahead

two kids share one ice-cream

               another brief lick at the drought

when the dirt blows there's no fence

               that will keep the dirt out

only stars hang in the window

roos, moving south

– Eric Beach

---

Adlestrop

Read "Adlestrop"

Alamein

At Camberwell she chants—Change here for the Alamein line.
So I did because my uncle used to say that word in a certain way.

Riversdale Willison Hartwell Burwood Ashbuston Alamein.
I was the only person who got off here. And nobody got on.

A bemused and indolent suburb, stunned by peace.
A slow car bumbling through the shadows of trees.

A shop with a tiny woman behind the tower of tic-tacs
and the deep throb of the drinks fridge by the sticky door.

I looked around for a war memorial but I could find none.
Just an insignificant station like the original El Alamein.

The sunshine and the lazy trees and the somnolent ease
are a true memorial for my uncle and the men like him.

– Jennifer Compton

First day on the beat

Vincent receives the National Library tokotoko from Hon Chris Tremain. Photograph by Mark Beatty.

There's nothing like being presented with a marvellously myth-laden and symbolic tokotoko by the Minister of Internal Affairs to focus the mind on what that rather chromium-plated phrase, 'Poet Laureate', bears with it – the tradition of poets who carry on the business of poetry very much in their own way. I don't think many prescriptions for poetry stand up apart from one – if it isn't individual, if it's not 'the cry of its occasion', then why aren't we doing something else?

Since the laureateship though is a public role, as well as a personal trust, there’s the very reasonable expectation that what you are up to as a poet becomes information that you are prepared to share. This means both what one does, and where one's values as a writer lie, are there to be observed. Here, I will say something of what I may have been doing in the world of fellow poets and their varied interests. This site will also carry new and unpublished poems I may have been working on, and poems by others I particularly admire. I shall also invite different poets to choose a poem of their own, as well as contemporary and older pieces that significantly ring for them. It's the breadth of poetry I want to take in, not just my own narrow questing through its terrain.

If I may rattle the banner for a moment, poetry is hospitable to pretty much anything, other than the cosy and complacent. As a kind of masthead, I begin with what must be close to my favourite New Zealand poem, a touchstone for so much that I like poetry to do. Then two poems from my last collection, Us, Then, published just before the laureateship was announced.

And special thanks to Ian, for his kind good wishes as the baton changes hands. Here’s to Berlin.

---

Spectacular Blossom, by Allen Curnow

Mock up again, summer, the sooty altars
Between the sweltering tides and the tin gardens
All the colours of the stained bow windows

Quick, she’ll be dead on time, the single
Actress shuffling red petals to this music,
Percussive light! So many suns she harbours

And keeps them jigging, her puppet suns,
All over the dead hot calm impure
Blood noon tide of the breathless bay.

Are the victims always so beautiful?

Pearls pluck at her, she has tossed her girls
Breast-flowers for keepsakes now she is going
For ever and astray. I see her feet

Slip into the perfect fit the shallows make her
Purposefully, sure as she is the sea
Levels its lucent ruins underfoot

That were sharp dead white shells, that will be sands.
The shallows kiss like knives.

Always for this.
They are chosen for their beauty.

Wristiest slaughterman December smooths
The temple bones and parts the grey-blown brows
With humid fingers. It is an ageless wind

That loves with knives, it knows our need, it flows
Justly, simply as water greets the blood,
And woody tumours burst in scarlet spray.

An old man’s blood spills bright as a girl’s
On beaches where the knees of light crash down.
These dying ejaculate their bloom.

Can anyone choose
And call it beauty?–The victims
Are always beautiful.

About Allen Curnow.
Reproduced courtesy of the copyright holder, Tim Curnow.

---

On the track above the bay

Grinning was the best part of it,
once you’d scoffed the blackberries
up above the beach:
                                          you grinned black
like a crazed ink-drinker,
                                                    well,
rusted ink, let’s say:
                                         an elderly
man who had eaten libraries
liked watching the child:
                                                  'Some
taste bitter, or better than others,
you’ll never run out', though
scratches along her arms’ll tell him
how 'Hard to get at them, see, my wrists
still bleeding'.
                             It's red scribble, she thinks
of. Or 'Like lace', he wants to tell her,
'like stinging lace'.

First time, about Easter

There was a donkey inside a wire fence where the road
begins its first climb to the Rimutakas.

We passed it on Friday late afternoon for years,
passed it again coming back on Sundays, or thought

so in winter, when the dark was already down.
It was more grey than not, though children

reasonably argued the toss, and its muzzle
this frosty white, without question. You could not of course

hear from inside the car, but once we saw
its neck extended, its teeth displayed, without

doubt it was braying, and looked hurt: our driver
said No, it was nothing like it, yet thought of the horse

with the spiked tongue in Guernica, the blue-grey horse,
or paler even, imagine the glare of a search-light

picking it out in a show called 'War Arriving'.
Then one day it is gone, the donkey on the first

incline towards the Rimutaka hill. A dozen reasons.
I forgot, says another driver, a long time later,

to ever mention, did I, the one time
it snowed that far down the hill, the donkey

standing in the white paddock brought tears
to my eyes? Its head hung forward

as though too heavy for its body. As though,
finally and forever, that bit too much.

A donkey in a snowed-in paddock, under trees black
as its hooves. On the Rimutaka road. One Friday.

Your new Poet Laureate

The National Library is thrilled to announce our selection of the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2013-2015: Vincent O’Sullivan.

Photograph by Mark Beatty.

One of New Zealand’s most significant literary figures, Vincent will be a superb voice of and for the nation’s poetry. The British critic Chris Millar recently wrote of O’Sullivan’s work, "You can’t ask much more of a poet than wit, profundity and elegance, and they’re all here in spades."

While Vincent settles in, we welcome him to the site – here for him to use as he will for the next two years – with a poem from his most recent book, Us, Then.

Road from the Camp

A story here I wish I hadn’t heard –
a row of prisoners stitched with yellow stars
marching a summer road, oddly surprised
to pass a compound lined with circus bears,

with creatures of diverse and mottled kind,
remnants from simple entertainments lost.
Both sides look up, confused, the memories stir,
the bears perform their stunts for favours tossed

once their way by children, parents – scraps
for begging paws. Those mimed displays
a hundred years back, was it? Thinking how
they and these once met in civil ways.

This is the story of the final show,
the trawl of stars from village and from city.
The bears withdraw their paws, conclude their dance,
watching the humans pass with almost pity.