Snaps 123, August 31 2005
Here are my poems,
my simple English offerings.
Let the feminist analysts, neomarxist formalists,
peripatetic mystics, unmovable skeptics,
my father
and whatever readers remain
say what they will.
Bring it on!
Janet Jackson
***
On Acceptance
One night, as meditation's flame
burned in me, I touched it to the lamp
of eloquence. A man whose own speech
others rarely understand heard my words.
"Well said!" was all he could think to say,
but then his malice spoke as well-a cry
of pain at his own inferiority-
"He writes well enough to handle moral
guidance, abstinence and mysticism,
but he doesn't speak at all of heavy clubs
or spears or other weapons used to put
the finishing touches on another person!"
He didn't know I have no head for war
and that is why I write the way I write,
but I too can sharpen my tongue like a sword
or puncture other's rhetoric with my pen.
Come, let's follow where this thinking leads us
and make for my enemy's head a pillow of stones.
Happiness lies in what the Just One gives you;
you cannot grab it with a forceful arm.
If Heaven doesn't grant you a favored empire,
courage alone will not rope one in.
The ant's weakness does not cause him hardship;
nor do lions eat by their claws alone.
Since we cannot take up arms against the stars,
we have no choice but to adapt to their turning.
If destiny confers old age on you,
death will not come on the point of a blade
or in a wild beast's open mouth,
but when your life has reached its destined end,
medicine will kill you just like poison.
When Rustam ate the last of this life's portions,
didn't Shaghad turn him into dust?
Richard Jeffrey Newman
***
Missing Graham
Though it¹s months since he died,
news or thoughts still come to me
I want to try out on him:
a perception prompted by
a Bergman movie, the pain
and grace of which I wish he¹d seen;
another refutation of
the Œnot-Shakespeare¹ heresy
(why did it attract him?);
word of that East European
conductor who so
seldom recorded;
a turn in Eliot, the would-be
classic, that links
him back to romanticism;
a rejoinder about
his fierce dismissal
of Freudianism...
that I might hear his prompt
humorous appreciation,
weighing and judging,
extending and placing.
Is it his mind I miss?
More than that, his chuckle,
his expressive sigh,
the troubled eye,
the firm footsteps of one
who fathomed so much
and might, had bodily health
been his, have gone further;
the briefest exchange with whom
left a person more
capable of seriousness.
Max Richards
Melbourne
Wednesday 31 August 2005
***
Erased Sonnet/ Number 18
William Shakespeare - 1593
Shall y?
T e:
R y,
A e:
S s,
A d,
A s,
B d:
B e,
N r,
N e,
W t;
S e,
So thee.
Stephen Vincent -2005
***
CAT
cat
cat's ear
cats blood
cat's emergency
cat's carrier
cat's vet
cat's operation
cat's stitches
cat's collar
cat's protective collar
cat can't scratch
cat unhappy
cat back
cat
cat's ear again
cats blood again
cat's emergency again
cat's carrier again
cat's vet again
cat's operation again
cat's stitches again
cat's collar again
cat's protective collar again
cat can't scratch again
cat unhappy again
cat back again
to be continued
pmcmanus -
for VB -Vile Boris
Raynesparklondonuk
***
Answered Yearning
the fraying basket
worn worried and
finally weary
turned itself over
until it was empty
its sad bent frame
uprighted itself
for mere convenience
an afterthought
in eternal afternoon
soon surprise and wonders
caught in its plaited ribs
red velvet bows
green glass beads
ivory silk ribbons
twined in gold thread
a hummingbird feather
carefully collected
now a rich soft display
the basket brought
a sharp-eyed magpie
from her uncertain sky
into his cradling nest.
Judy Prince
***
CHANGE MANAGEMENT a capital idea,
as variously said of Stainer's
crucifixion, Western civilisation;
as plaintively incised into the bath-
house walls of cities drowned
and choked, alongside MENTULAM CACO, there
where one delivers one's opinion
of his supreme beneficence. Chalk up your names,
you passers-by, fresh out of lamentations.
--
Perhaps (but not likely) I may be still
a whizz at ordinary language and you
mishear things.
-- Geoffrey Hill,
Discourse: For Stanley Rosen
Dominic Fox
***
News
And the announcement reaches
her after a long, rainy
season as she stands in the
shower reading the card as the
soap swirls around her feet.
The whiteness divides and the
crimson nails peek through.
Brigit Bond
***
THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
(after Pompeii graffiti, art found, in memory of New Orleans)
What did Prevert write (I cannot
find the original or a translation
so my memory must be persistent)?
"Do not fear, your dead are not dead."
Do not fear or do not weep--I can't recall,
but what difference except to a pedant?
Remains of the day:
"My love, I ate you out like I was a dog,"
"I'm saving my ass for Columbinus."
"Noli mi tangere for Caesar's I am
and wild for to hold though I seem tame."
You breathed. The lava flooded your city
thousands of you smothered, burned,
taken by the Cinder House Rules:
die all, die merrily.
Stadia, brothels, wrought-iron balconies,
erect men and turgid women
weaponded men and razor-armed women
act as though there's no tomorrow
and probably they are right.
Steven Seagal will inherit the earth.
Yet once you wrote your names on cathouse walls:
love, hate, bang, pull out, never in time
for you wrote and reproduced, reinforced
the disgusting lie that writing, even
graffiti, is an act of love that obviates,
obliviates, the love we make in life,
that these are your children instead of
the real children you might have made,
if made themselves, dead long ago as well.
We look at your words, accidental art,
know they are bullshit and terror,
yet frame them, preserve them,
because the choice is to lose you.
Kenneth Wolman
***
to colour this day in ...
no, to fence this day in ...
no, to coat this day with ...
words.
they catch in the guttural
and down the disdain,
they lighten up the littoral
and clarify the pane
they rebop the bebop
and slop your slippage
they can't let you sleep
you're on their night's edge
so take down your sycophants
and dust off the clues
they're rapping time's rants
with the tongue of your shoes
Andrew Burke
Mt Lawley
31/08/2005
***
Drenched With Poetry
Vulnerable - open
to the entrapments
of stylistic fixation,
knowing
their tendencies
toward language-centered
relative positions
(a horizontal mapping, of sorts)
and that editing composition
literally recalls attention
to their previous
spatial arrangements - they,
nevertheless, begin to read
on the same page
Their first instances;
star, blue, orchid,
bloodrush . . . explosion !
Their tongues wet
with anticipation
they reinvent word patterns -
compose the sky with clarification;
asterisks, apostrophes
and ellipses . . .
Drenched with poetry, the silt
of their languageslips silently
in rhythm and rhyme
The impulses, pulse within
the covers of their book
and the desire
for vertical integration
becomes co-existent
with narrative frames
The experience entices fingers
with new poems (in a minimalist form)
and quickens even
the movement of time
Deborah Russell
***
Bulky in top, and shorts and logos,
tanned round skull shaven to the brain,
it grins at the woman who's near it.
This is an automat gesture -
as a dog looks round, mapping itself
on to the moving pack, as a bird
flies because another bird flies.
Lacking a sense of higher power,
it may be violent, may think
itself feral. It's dressed to fill
several familiar old images.
One sees the space as a pet, or a child,
glimpsing a common jeopardy,
jam-packed by courage without great risk.
Lawrence Upton
***
what worlds float
fragmented washed astray
into & through
lenses held apart
a necessary distance
oil slicks on a northern lake
blue & rainbowed
& sluicing across
a sunburnt arm down south
so a city streets of
river bursting
through first storey windows
the broken
the lost
the gone
silence only
a rhetoric sufficient to
the washed away
Douglas Barbour
August 31 2005
***
drive
on black
walk on edge
rain
down here
to no-one's plan
rumble
out there
above the sea
world
and plans
climb in clouds
sleep
all round
at blue windows
water
and pills
words catch inside
rise
more thoughts
above night span
Jill Jones
Marrickville, 10.46pm, 1 September 2005
***
Doug,
This poem is so visual for me.
As I read it my eyes move across the surface
as if I am gazing at a painting
seeing compositional directions, visceral brush strokes,
an inner form and structure.
"& sluicing across
a sunburnt arm down south "
...brought me down to the edge of the canvas...
" so a city streets of
river bursting
through first storey windows "
...brings me back up and into it again...
" silence only
a rhetoric sufficient to
the washed away "
...my gaze is left lingering.
Peter Ciccariello
|
