What the future holds

Hear the voice of the bard who past, present and future sees,
intoned our own William Blake, James K. Baxter,
in his back to front overcoat,
hitchhiking towards Jerusalem,
and waiting for the future to catch up with him.
Poetry touches the soul from the beginnings of the world,
where we were once whole,
and maybe, too, reaches for Shakespearean oblivion,
where our future's in the stars.
In Māori thought, the past, the deeds of the ancestors,
is actively confronted by the living. The past is called ngā rā o mua,
the days in front. Time collapses into a continuous present,
into the long clock of now.
Our clock, though, might have been painted by Salvador Dali.
So, what does the future hold?
What does the future hold,
besides another flickering episode
of 'Burnt Planet' narrated by the computer-generated voice
of Sir David Attenborough?
The future is no longer what it was, because we wanted flying cars —
and what we got was Twitter —
or 140 characters in a novel by Ellie Catton.
In the era of Covid-nineteen, we locked down
to save the paua and the glory of the nation, for the future.
It ain't nothing, so give it a name — the future.
In quantum mechanics,
the answers surround us, but we don't know the question —
call it the future.
We here in Aotearoa, with our Communist Princess leader,
are the blacksmiths of the red future,
we hammer out the keys to happiness,
living in Te Wai Pounamu.
The world's gone indoors, but we're rewilding parks and lawns,
and knitting together wild and woolly yarns,
for the foreseeable, for the future —
where climate change is the loose change
of conversation dropped on the food chain of the homeless,
and hedgefunds light up with neoliberal domination,
and Uncle Hohum is there in the easy chair,
with all the great and the good with shiny faces,
greasy with butter and China-bound milk powder,
their casino table aces flung on a green hectare.
The future is not what it was — and may Jeff Bezos
save the Amazon, but not in his image,
and may Elon Musk turn into a skull-trinket
wreathed in the musk of cannabis sativa,
and may the screw-loose, the hyper-loopies,
those who dwell in the Last Chance Saloon,
learn their fate at last...
drought, famine, mudslide, refugee camp, bread queue —
just press that button bro, and up we all go —
the car bleats in response to a thumbed key fob.
So spritz some Bezos into your existence,
the abracadabra of alibaba is amaze-on!
Ocean to ocean, one clearing station, amaze-on!
Container by container, metal as anything, amaze-on!
The hyper-normals are in denial about the source of the Nile,
and wearing cut-off denims and a faded tan,
and each one is a very big fan of the last one.
And there goes Elon Musk's sky-train
silver as Santa's sleigh lit by the sun's last ray
in a dark sky on Christmas Day
chugging across the Milky Way
bringing strings of satellites to every quadrant,
flagrant, vagrant, space junk in every quadrant
that's up there, binding the globe to its transponders
in perfect wonder and interstellar cold,
as we look on from our kauri tree platform,
while feral things snuffle and hoot into the early morn.

In the future, the plant managers are planet managers,
a thousand hour day is normal,
but it only lasts a nanosecond in the long clock of now.
A psychic numbing may be your best defence.
You're tracked, parsed, mined, and modified to make sense,
then caressed to find what you like best.
The right to be forgotten has been removed in jest,
but exclusion is not an option.
See the eggplant emoji that ate Chicago,
for Ford is in his flivver and we got your cargo,
and for what you want, how far will you go?
It's all gone to the great aggregator at the worm farm,
but how are you going to pay for what you just took?
It's the wisdom of Uncle Google and his little red book
down in the deep of deeps where he keeps his rest.

So what does the future hold
when they're paying attention
in the attention economy?
All those eyeballs rolling loose,
now jammed in a jam-jar,
strobed by white light, white noise.
The X things only a Y would understand,
the 13 struggles all left-handers know to be true,
the 21 things the algorithm knows about you,
on this Earth, this one weeping eyeball,
where neophiliacs check their messages
looking for a weapons upgrade,
and glut upon glut has gone splut,
and the nut section of the supermarket
is the largest — anti-vaxxer nuts, conspiracy nuts, gun nuts,
science-denying nuts, religious nuts.

Nobody move. Everybody down.
Everybody reach high.
Who knows who anymore, it's always the other guy.
Get your core meaning scrambled in a blender,
then sliced and diced and sold off,
before being returned to sender.
Go ahead, encrypt the panticon to base-line anon,
where everything is coloured high-key
and seems to offer serendipity,
as you prepare to deactivate the soc med binary.
Either stolen or broken or burning,
faster, faster, faster, yada, yadda, yadda...

But really what the future holds for you and me
is just another cup of tea,
comfort slippers and a lumpy sofa,
and quietly waiting till this Covid is over.
The future repeats as you creak up the stairs,
horrendous youth, querulous dear dears,
dry leaves falling from deciduous trees,
and no let-up on your diagnosed disease.
There's no let-up, no-one stops,
all is forward momentum unto the next generation,
— and more moral panic, more fornicating in the streets,
angst in the pants and fancy-schmancy O.E.
They got booths for the aged, booths for the terminal,
and a plan for a hospital that looks unwell.
But build me up, buttercup, don't break my heart,
— shouldn't the future be a brand-new start?
Dream on buster because the future's lost its lustre.
From the salt and pepper moptop of Sergeant Pepper
to the shiny busby of the American Princess Markle,
that's bolder, better, and has more sparkle,
the puppet strings of algorithims
animate us endlessly, through every kind of insecurity.
Yesterday was so five minutes ago,
it's got up and gone to Goneville again,
so everyone get on the particle accelerator,
everyone get with the giggle generator, everyone say, see you later.
Everything's correctable if it's detectable.
Eyes brighter that the eye of Sauron,
they are talking to Baby Yoda about the future.
Loud as the buzz of all the bees in bumbledom,
there's a march for equal rights by a million possums,
and, off and on, QAnon shuffle off to Buffalo.
As my autograph is my witness,
they strip-mined my data to make it their business.
How sharp is your semi-conductor?
How green is your silicon valley?
Collective murmuration, crack of starter's pistol,
draw a red rectangle around it and call it the AI recognition state,
out on the bleeding edge where the future is being made
with a twenty per cent error rate.
Never to smart to learn, never too old to dance,
In End Times, the future is toast and I'm history,
escaping with a hiss, and maybe a sense of mystery.
Kia ora!

— David Eggleton

‘Long Easter Weekend’ and ‘Anzac Day Thunder’

Long Easter Weekend

Some face Easter by hunting a stag bull,
with cupped hands and cooees to the cull.
Others lift apple windfall to a barrel.
Big wax combs drip the last of the vernal
honey, the altars are covered with purple.
A clean syringe kill, nails in the gnarls
of crucified churls, a dish of buns to startle
those nested in texts at the kitchen table.
The equinox gets up its howl and rattle.
Deicide brings the hanging Jesus to dwell
on the tree of man; while Māui's van signals
the way to Moeraki, or to deep-sounding bell.

As gods rise from the ferment of brine,
a carved wave ploughs a pure line.
Diadems shine in cobwebs at sunrise,
wool floss is bright, caught by barbed wire.
Yesterday's wisps fly on the breeze of today,
the blue sky transmits holy oracles.
Sunlight reveals everywhere a miracle.
The bedroom window opens out from the sill.
Back lawn is dappled by lepidoptera,
grey clouds gather like butterfly hunters.
Brewed nectar in the first sip to thrill,
thereafter bitter ichor all the way down.

 — David Eggleton

Anzac Day Thunder

Fields of blood flood Sunday's sky,
enough to paint the town red,
over Dunedin's Dawn Parade,
and thoughts turn to Gallipoli,
carved by trenches where Anzacs
dug themselves in, and Otago's
D. Skinner took a potshot
at Kemal Ataturk on horseback
but only creased his hair or somesuch
in the War to End All Wars.
And now autumn continues
unseasonable, dry leaves orange
above fluorescent road cones.
We ride by bike out to Port Chalmers,
to ride by boat across the harbour,
while a distempered gale stirs the sea.
A half-past-it flag snaps to attention,
as Rachel, skipper of MV
Sootychaser, grasps our bikes
and lifts each into the stern, then we're
motoring past Quarantine Island,
butting waves to the Peninsula,
as the sky darkens thunderous black,
lit up by muzzle flashes.
Raindrops squirm down the windscreen
of the vessel, like a giant's drool.
Through razzle-dazzle we thud and buffet.
In the distance, small yachts vanish
Fast clouds scud, throwing threads of water
that gleam like tears of the albatross.
A rainbow shawl arches Harbour Cone,
there's a ghost of feathery snowfall
from vortex of hail-studded heaven,
as we wallow against Broad Bay jetty,
drawn up close by the skill of the skipper.
Soused tangles of wrack and kelp
spangle like submerged poppy garlands.
Haloed by sunshower rain-arrows,
past hill humps of Portobello,
under thunderstorm's indigo,
we are cycling through gale wallow
all the way to Pukekura,
home of the albatross colony
on a bluff hooked like a bird's beak.
There, the southern royals veer
and dip or tilt in windshear,
to swoop and soar as gliders,
while we twist and turn from flying grit
and hustle inside the café,
looking to blunt the edge of the wind.
Select your slipstream, ride your
clobbering machine like a port
container straddle-carrier
with traction of a sky-sailor,
and catch your breath from teeth of the gale
Lifted by the swell of the land,
we cycle back round the harbour
that's rucking against the wind's force.
The road's a groove carved above the shore,
where in summer a tide of red krill
bloomed like a harvest of red petals.
Now in evening light the sky clears,
but the southerly still funnels
relentlessly over the flat strand
of South Dunedin, while the sea
wreathes and unwreathes, stained
crimson by the reflected sun.

 

— David Eggleton

Autumn Almanac

March begins and this isn't Flint, Michigan,
this is Wakouaiti, so why the toxic tap flow,
chemical warfare creeping through a waterhole?
Self-harmer farmers in a town called Malice,
and all the screens hand-held to make you jealous.
Way out here on the borders of disorder,
things that you look at get smaller and smaller.
The price of a house measured in skyrockets,
pieces of string and very deep pockets.
Anonymous veto, not for profit's got to go;
marginal is as marginal does at zero times zero.
Pete Dutton takes out the trash for compaction,
with all the compassion of a bog of liquefaction.
In his Jurassic Park mind he's top dinosaur,
as psychopathic as Mohammed bin Bone-Saw.
Hydrofoils, peppermill, and salt grinder:
America's Cup yachts, flying a blinder —
Luna Rossa's a sinking Prada handbag.
You are the Alpha and the Oprah agog,
check the righteous Princess, the Windsor frog;
Lorde knows, we will never be Royals on TV,
but at least we got water trucks in Waikouaiti.
Quakes made the ocean dance like Beyoncé's
booty-bounce over from the Kermadecs;
everyone hit the decks like nervous wrecks,
but it all fell flatter than a soufflé,
and Queenstown's a limbo-dancer in limbo,
go low, go lower, get your lawyer on the blower.
The bang on a can brigade leave the smelter,
carrying all the aluminium they will ever need
for tinfoil hats and the dross of anti-5G.
Destiny and Tamaki are revving up a Harley,
oozing oily unction, greasy hair and skin.
What he quotes is not quite from the Bible,
and what he preaches is almost libel.
So many contradictory narratives —
anti-vaxxers swear each is an eye-witness.
They don't believe in an interventionist jab,
or in Jacinda Ardern's gift of the gab,
but have faith in swarms of micro-aggressions
by Mike Hosking in his minute-long sessions —
more outlandish, the better they like them.
There's Cruella Collins and her 101 Damnations:
devilish thoughts of Covid-weakened nations
climbing to the top of decline and fall;
you will know them by their trail of the dead.
Autism, colonialism, evangelism, behaviourism,
are shades of the doxology economy.
Feel the hot breeze of aggressive reason,
anarchist or rationalist for the Hollywood LOLs
of Bezos Zuckerberg and the Deadly Hallows.
Locked out, locked in, locked up, locked down:
when can everyone go mask free, town to town?
When can the cray-cray king get a new crown?
There's the horoscope, the personality quiz,
the credit rating and the click-baiting.
I got a gut feeling, everyone's waiting.

Ōtepoti,16 March 2021

— David Eggleton

The Situation 2021: Peter Olds

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. A kind of Poet Laureate's Choice of work from Aotearoa New Zealand poets for the Poet Laureate blog. Essentially, it will be a portfolio of poetry, posted over the next while, from a range of poets whose work I have enjoyed reading recently: interesting poems for interesting times.

— David Eggleton

Wild beans & a white butterfly 

In the nun's cottage
we have white rice,
a tin of curry powder

and some watercress
the girls had gathered
from the paddock creek.

Along the fence wire
below the Convent
I picked some green beans

growing wild
on a scrawny vine,
then took them back

to the cottage —
made a feed from boiled rice,
watercress, curry powder

and wild beans
We'd been half-starved
for weeks, feeding

on eel and fried bread . . .
The beans and watercress
went down a treat

something Holy from
fence and creek.
We were the children

of Jerusalem and the Great
Guru was down the river
going round the towns

giving aroha-talks for money
and reciting poetry —
smoking up large, stuffing

himself on pork and Chinese
kai . . . A white butterfly
flies into the cottage.

— Peter Olds

Hail & Water

(Letter to Stephen Oliver),

I've never seen hail & water fall
so much in such a short time. The
roads turned into rivers, gutters
disappeared under six inches of
hail. Cars stopped, jaws dropped . . .
One had pictures of the Flood, &
wondered when the fucking Ark
was going to make an appearance!
The sky turned black as night,
sirens wailed, streetlights blinked
at stalled streets, the air streaked
like some New York modern painting:
Surreal, unreal, leaving high tide
marks of ice in the doorways of
mid-town shops

— Peter Olds

Peter Olds biography

Peter Olds was born in Christchurch in 1944, he left school at sixteen and after meeting James K. Baxter in Dunedin in the 1960s, began writing poetry. He was a Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1978. In 2005 he was an inaugural recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry. He lives in Dunedin. His previously published collections include Lady Moss Revived (1972), Freeway (1974), Beethoven’s Guitar (1980), It Was a Tuesday Morning: Selected Poems 1972-2001 (2004), Poetry Reading at Kaka Point (2006), Under the Dundas Street Bridge (2012), and You fit the description: The Selected Poems of Peter Olds, with an introduction by Ian Wedde, which was published by Cold Hub Press in 2014.

Peter Olds. Image by Anne-Marie Davis.

The Situation 2021: Sue Wootton

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. A kind of Poet Laureate's Choice of work from Aotearoa New Zealand poets for the Poet Laureate blog. Essentially, it will be a portfolio of poetry, posted over the next while, from a range of poets whose work I have enjoyed reading recently: interesting poems for interesting times.

— David Eggleton

Sapiens

Where goes my body, where goes my mind,
that journey’s dust settles on me, sheet

upon sheet. My winding sheets, my coil,
my solenoid core, my sedimental sentiments,

all I walk through layered on me, pressed,
preserved. I carry my divining and designing

rods across the lodes, sum myself in strings
and Fibonacci spirals. The tempo of spheres

is my comfort and my curiosity. Loom, wheel,
slide rule. Gimbals and ullage and magnificent

desolation. I am galvanised by itch
and mystery, doomed to want

to know. Engine and ingenuity, mitochondrial
machine. This is my tissue-thin life, a matter

of strata and stratagem, microplastics in the carbon
record, a geology of thought and peristalsis,

the chitter-chatter of cell life in its arc. I strew
my trails. Melt reveals my strops and blades, my yarns

and needles. I am an anatomy of pollen and mites, host
to the democratic cacophony, bacteria, parasite,

the viral load. I accrue in layers, though I shed
and shed my soiled skins, although regardless

I forget and forget. In my meteor craters
and my caves snore physicists, poets, healers,

mariners, prophets and gods. I take my pick
to the glittering seams for what clear thread persists,

drawing it through the thick of the tangle.
Word-boned animal with a lace-work mind

blind with gimp and spangle, holed
with loss and limbic-wired for terror,

constantly assailed by vertigo on the lip
of the fathomless fall. Yet the visions pierce.

I swoon, still dizzied in my cities by distant stars,
by the glaze of evening sunlight on a street,

by a certain slant upon a single tree, its portal brilliance,
the excellence and delicacy of a gilt-edged leaf.

— Sue Wootton

 

 

Ōwheo 

How strange it is, a river, made of motion,
made of air, the way it’s every moment

its own catchment and its own release,
full presence, incomplete trajectory,

each rill containing every upstream rill,
each ripple-surge a leading edge that,

in the instant of its observation, dissolves,
pours forward and entirely follows, source

and seeking – both – with all it was
propelling all its going, so that the current

singing to the clock tower from the weirs
is more than it appears, and utters it, karakia

to the summit’s wind, the moon, the stars,
the cap cloud streaming over Cargill,

so that to cross Ōwheo on the footbridge is to cross

dawn chorus, evening roost, the ruru,
frost-beaded moss, five-finger, broadleaf, fern,

whip-tailed kōura in the dappled burn,
deleatidium, smelt, a fuchsia flower afloat,

the ghostly chunk-chunk-chunk
of watermills, and hammer-echo, axe,

the pin-point glow shone in by fungus gnats
from mucus droplets strung on silk,

the footprints of a mayfly strutting
on the pollen-dusted riverskin – is to cross

a long kōrero, whose strands and trails
and traces whisper, babble, surface, disappear,

a telling in the valley of its knowing,
if we would but learn to hear.

(Ōwheo: the Māori name for The Water of Leith.)    

— Sue Wootton

Sue Wootton biography

Sue Wootton’s novel Strip (Mākaro Press) was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and her most recent poetry collection, The Yield (OUP), was a finalist in these awards in 2018. She was the 2008 Robert Burns Fellow, and held the 2018/19 NZSA Beatson Fellowship. She was awarded the 2020 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. Sue lives in Ōtepoti-Dunedin where she is the recently-appointed Publisher at Otago University Press.

Sue Wootton. Image by Oscar Francis. 

The Situation: Carolyn McCurdie

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. A kind of Poet Laureate's Choice of work from Aotearoa New Zealand poets for the Poet Laureate blog. Essentially, it will be a portfolio of poetry, posted over the next while, from a range of poets whose work I have enjoyed reading recently: interesting poems for interesting times.

— David Eggleton

Along Imaginary Lines of Longitude

At night this city beach disconnects from time

and place. You step from the street to the sand

and the town recedes – flux of tyres on wet roads,

 

wind-swung streetlights creasing the puddles,

laughter cut off by a door slam – all leak away

like the muted nag of old worries.

 

Winter wind licks your neck,

chews and worries your hair, your sleeves,

eyelashes.

 

The tide’s coming in, slow forward, slow back,

and stern with the weight of all the world’s water,

weight of the drowned, and the not-drowned.

They’re out there, heaving, restless, where the dark is neither

sea nor sky, and some of them are yours, your forbears.

 

Family links are thin, but your surname’s a patrilineal thread

from old Gaelic, meaning sea-captain. It’s a slippery fact,

greasy with guesses, assumptions, unlooped from bollards

on other islands, another hemisphere, but reeling you in,

among Donalds, and Dannys, and Marys, and Lizzies,

migrants to tenements, to unskilled work,

and bone-deep torpor of the dispossessed.

 

And further back,

through the wash of submarines, minesweepers, fishing smacks,

to the naval fleet of an Iron Age people who braved the Atlantic.

 

And tonight, you peer out at a blurred Pacific horizon;

you feel them, half-see them, lively, hoary, like spray,

like oar-churn, oar-flick, salt-rotted sails that flare and sink,

decks slick with danger binding the crew in unspoken,

ferocious belonging. Eyebrows low,

hands cracked, and stinging, holding on to come home.

Knowing how.

 

And because of that knowing, you exist.

If they asked: how are you so hollow, unknowing?

How can you live so unmoored? Neither you, the wind

nor the world would have answers.

 

No answers,

but you take off your shoes, step forward. Step again.

In comes the water, pushing, claiming; the cold’s a shock

to the braced touchpoints of your feet.

It’s not much. But it’s something.

A small, blood-felt connection.

— Carolyn McCurdie

Carolyn McCurdie biography

Carolyn McCurdie is a Dunedin writer of poetry and fiction. She won the 1998 Lilian Ida Smith Award for her fiction, and first prize in the  NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Competition in 2013. Her poetry collection, Bones in the Octagon was published by Mākaro Press in 2015.

Carolyn McCurdie. Image by Doug Lilly.

The Situation: Alan Roddick

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. A kind of Poet Laureate's Choice of work from Aotearoa New Zealand poets for the Poet Laureate blog. Essentially, it will be a portfolio of poetry, posted over the next while, from a range of poets whose work I have enjoyed reading recently: interesting poems for interesting times.

— David Eggleton

The End of a Road

‘Mount Royal Road’ and ‘Pleasant Valley’ were names
that spoke for years of a ‘sweet, especial scene’ –

but something had gone wrong, the road-sign drooping
as if the name were too much for it – and yet 

below Mount Royal that road still strolled away
past grazing cattle under English oaks,

across the Pleasant River, and out of sight.
The map showed where it passed the farmhouse gate

to turn toward the hills – and suddenly,
among shaven slopes, stumps, hillocks of slash,

it was nothing but a pot-holed access road
for the forestry plantations far inland, 

with its maunga, Mount Royal, long out of sight.
When a road loses its name, where does it go?  

I can see it now, as it makes its way back
down to the valley floor to pass that farmhouse,

rumbling over the bridge, under the willows,
through those paddocks, to where, below Mount Royal,

a new signpost announces ‘Stenhouse Road’.
And right there Mount Royal Road ended.

— Alan Roddick

  

The Mystery 

To put together two metal components
made for each other, one of them being ‘male’
that must be ‘offered’ properly to the ‘female’: 

a wealth of metaphor in those terms, and yet 
the simple task is to screw them together
with maybe six turns, to make a garden tap.  

My first attempt puts the spout at nine o’clock,  
the tap-handle at three (one more metaphor).
Dismantling it for a second try, this time

perhaps I should start them off the wrong way up,
hoping they’re right-way-up some six turns later?
But no, the spout’s at one, the handle hiding;

upside-down at seven. Too many failures,
and that’s why I’m waiting here, expectantly,
to watch as a real plumber wraps his hemp 

clockwise round the thread, then fits them together
to tighten, maybe five or six rotations,
seating the spout at twelve! The handle at six! 

Unconcerned, he applies his wrench to the thing
with careful force to urge it one more half-turn
and give us a garden tap, the right way up.

As he turns on our toby to check for leaks
I wonder how to make use of what I’ve learned –
that it’s not where to start, but how to finish?

 — Alan Roddick

Alan Roddick biography

Alan Roddick has published two collections of poems and is working on a third. As Charles Brasch’s literary executor for nearly fifty years, he has edited three collections of Brasch’s poems. He has also published a monograph and articles on the poetry of Allen Curnow. A retired public health dentist, he lives in Dunedin.

Alan Roddick. Image by Jill Milne.

The Situation: Richard Reeve

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. A kind of Poet Laureate's Choice of work from Aotearoa New Zealand poets for the Poet Laureate blog. Essentially, it will be a portfolio of poetry, posted over the next while, from a range of poets whose work I have enjoyed reading recently: interesting poems for interesting times.

— David Eggleton

The Knack

At Hank’s, Quentin just then at the table, gruff as ever

in his woollen hat, his heavy, tar-stained fingers

cradling a bag. Mushrooms, collected by him,

 

he tells us, from somewhere in Warrington’s schnitzel

of hedge and lawn. We don’t press the issue where,

gratefully receive, and later feast

 

drunk on the haul, delighting in the terroir of it all.

For Quentin has the knack, knowledge of locale,

seasoned we say from decades loitering,

 

lingering along Coast Road with the bay in tow,

cockles, mushrooms, apples seeded from the defecations

of former Seacliff interns visiting our groves,

 

Quentin attends the gullies, fringes; worries,

claims at the roadside nabbing the best of it,

while we others, holding down respectable jobs,

 

labour away beyond the mountain until evening,

retreat in late afternoon to decode our day

and drink his tales of sly grubbing before night.

— Richard Reeve

from And the Pukeko Shall Rule – Rain Poems

 

*

 

To live through the poem, be on the other side of it. Coming back

from Invercargill, turning east from Mataura to Clinton, the sky

 

flood-dark to the north, drove into a first sheet of rain, stopped

at Clinton for a pie as the rain rang down on the asphalt; went on

 

to Balclutha and the rampant Clutha, tree-tangled, brown,

its effluent-gilded floodwaters underneath the bridge

 

purging to the coast; to Milton, where by State Highway 1

pukeko on berms scratched for worms teased out by the rain,

 

behind them, a dirty inland sea slurping at the roadside;

to Henley, brown; across the Taieri, enormous, brown,

 

plastic silage bales bobbing about like ice cubes in soup;

Allanton, Mornington, Warrington; the end of the poem

 

still far off, though I believed it imminent on my arrival,

readying myself, stepped from the wheel into the rain.

*

 

A visit to your frail house. Then apart, following weather

north to its Waihola digs, rain like a boozer entrenched

 

in the lowlands before Maungatua. I consider your advice,

hover between being and being, the poem correcting itself

 

in squalls of creation,  as though a moment might echo

in preemption the pelting of words, glimmer of recognition

 

through the grey, something we labour to get back to,

the syntax at its root, prefigured in a vanishing scene.

 

I simply do not know where to go. Ever looking back,

strain forward, a knowing verb. For you, the way is ethical,

 

political, resigned, cavities everywhere having opened

in the cultivated surfaces that clothe the soaked earth.

I am inclined to agree. And remain subordinate no less

to the highway, its self-important lines, insisting north.

— Richard Reeve

Richard Reeve biography

Richard Reeve lives in Warrington, a coastal satellite township to the north of Dunedin. He has published six collections of poetry, most recently the poetry-sequence, Horse and Sheep (2019), which features as one of a bundle of six chapbooks by various poets published by Maungatua Press. Now a barrister, Reeve holds a Ph.D. from the University of Otago on “New Zealand poetic reality”, and has in the past worked as a literary and humanities editor for Otago University Press.

'The Knack' was previously published in the community newsletter Blueskin News.

Richard Reeve. Image by Marchell Linzey.

The Situation: Ruth Arnison

The Situation 2021

Tēnā koutou katoa

‘The Situation 2021’ is a continuation of ‘The Situation 2020’. A kind of Poet Laureate's Choice of work from Aotearoa New Zealand poets for the Poet Laureate blog. Essentially, it will be a portfolio of poetry, posted over the next while, from a range of poets whose work I have enjoyed reading recently: interesting poems for interesting times.

— David Eggleton

Silent lyrics

If I could sing you a love song I’d voice

not one word,

 

but play a tune over your lips with mine,

whisper a chorus of breaths in your ears.

 

If I could sing you a love song you’d hear

every caress in my silence,

 

fingertips outlining your face with a hum,

lips crooning over the creases on your brow.

 

If I could sing you a love song I’d tell you

without sounding a note,

 

toes entwining in a melody of moments,

fingers gentling in harmony with yours.

 

If I could sing you a love song I’d murmur

not one bar,

 

but scale your body with a rhythmic touch

signing these lyrics.

— Ruth Arnison

Driving to Wanaka’s Festival of Colour

Roadside cabbage trees stand like costumed Polynesian performers

while pylons, hands on hips, feet wide apart, await their zumba class.

 

The Manuka Gorge bends and snakes between shadow and light.

When we meet, slippery when frosty, next 5km, we slow down,

nervous skaters new to the rink.

 

A passing truck tattoos the windscreen with gravel, luckily it’s not

a full piercing. Not so lucky is the April-dead hawk, feathers stark

against the tarmac.

 

Approaching Lawrence a relocated house looks dislocated, stranded

mid muddy paddock, base boards torn away exposing beehive piles.

Sheep gather shade from rusted off-road abandoned stock trucks.

 

Sacks of farm gate sales - pinecones, kindling and horse poo – slouch

against disused school bus shelters. I’m given the ‘don’t even ask’ look

as he notes my eyes stalling on the compost possibilities.

 

Nearing Roxburgh, gorse descends on discarded orchards. Fleecy clouds staple

the sky and sheep yards, patiently waiting to go metric, stand empty. The hills

contort and crease with rocks balancing like tipsy macarons.

 

Max’s recomposed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons carries us onward, bypassing

Cromwell where two years of my life lie drowned beneath Lake Dunstan.

 

Now the hills are honey coloured and paddocks shorn of sheep. Fat hay bales,

stacked like ripening cheeses. Wanaka beckons, enticing us onwards

with further performances.

— Ruth Arnison

Ruth Arnison biography

Ruth Arnison is the afternoon Administrator at Knox College — a student residential college in Dunedin. Her poems have been published in literary journals, anthologies, and ezines in NZ, Australia, the UK and US. She has curated five PoARTry exhibitions in Dunedin with the sixth one, Tools of the Trade, taking place at Mercy Hospital, Dunedin, in March. She’s the editor of Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ), the instigator of Lilliput Libraries, and supplies Dunedin cafes/businesses with free Pocket Poetry cards. Her passion is to take poetry out of books and into neighbourhoods, schools and playgrounds.  With her “step sister’ Sheryl she is responsible for the Poems on Steps project around Dunedin. 

Ruth Arnison. Image provided. 

Travels with my Tokotoko

On the 10th of October 2020, at a powhiri on Matahiwi Marae, my Laureate tokotoko, Te Kore, finally found its way into my hand, after a six-month delay to the ceremony forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. By the 10th of December 2020, I had appeared in public reciting poems and talking about poetry about 30 times, all over Aotearoa. That evening, helping launch the 100th issue of Takahē literary magazine at the Sign of the Takahē restaurant in Christchurch, I read three of my poems included in the centenary issue.

David Eggleton and Te Kore at the Little Theatre in Picton. 

At Matahiwi, kaumatua Edward Timu and Des Ratima, along with tokotoko carver Jacob Scott and tokotoko presenter John Buck, emphasised that Te Kore would help me rise tall in oratory, and Jacob also suggested the hardwood staff, made of heavy, dense maire, would help protect me, like a taiaha, from the consequences of reciting some of my more provocative poems. Well, so far, touch wood, I haven't needed it for that protection, while the dramatic appearance of the dark-stained rākau, cuffed and reinforced with stainless steel circlets, has drawn all eyes.

Close up of carving on Te Kore. 

Te Kore means the Void, or Nothingness, out of which arises creation: the Void is charged, full of potential — from the cataclysm of a cosmic joke to the tremble of a tiny leaf splashed with rain. Te Kore has a cored-out knothole within its haft, through which you might glimpse Te Ao-marama: the bright light of day. I travel with Te Kore dissassembled, bundled up in a tapa cloth bag, sewn from the edge-piece of a large tapa mat presented by the fanau of my Tongan great-uncle Mateo Halafihi of Namoli, Tongatapu. The specially-designed bag has a zipper and a strengthened inner lining. The surface of Te Kore itself is delicately embellished with references to my Rotuman and Tongan whakapapa.

Te Kore in travelling tapa cloth bag. 

Writing a great poem is rather like being struck by lightning a handful of times after a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, the American poet Randall Jarrell reckoned. With its polished, beautiful dark grain, sombre as a scorched firestick, the slender and carven branch of a mighty tree, Te Kore would encourage any poet to write so as to make the familiar strange, questing after the transformative poem, the lightning flash. And so as I stand in front of the big poetry parade for the time of my tenure, I feel Te Kore is by me to keep me up to the mark, alert to metaphor and symbolism, the richness of living in these islands of Te Moana. Fai'eksia! Noa'ia e Mauri!

— David Eggleton