
Gill Ward, a Kapiti Coast poet writes for and to her whanau, her community in Poetic Explanations, a collection of nearly 80 poems that she describes as an ‘autobiography’. In ‘Gathering’, a poem read at the unveiling of her sister’s headstone, she writes: ‘if we could gather every one of those thoughts/…and weave them into a splendid cloak/ we would wrap you in it.’ There’s a whole sequence for this twin sister, who entered a strict religious order when she was 18 before later returning to the secular life, and who died after a lengthy illness.
They reminded me of you
with their dazzling yellow and flaming red
flamboyant
uncompromising
he enters the sepulchre of the Sunday papers,
peers through the glass at things buckled
and broken by last night’s unholy storm…
and though the wind has wrung
the neck of his white shirt upon the line,
its steaming like a hung goose
adds a certain denial to it all
(‘Two men in dressing gowns’)
turning a neck a child would love to swing from
…eyelashes come down
Her big, sassy hips sway past…
She is carrying a peach balloon to a party
that happened long ago.
(‘Cows crossing’)
a herd of cows does not need a choreographer
left to themselves
they always fall into tableaux
of the most ineluctable grandeur…
reclining in massive undulations of serenity
or standing velvet Parthenon…
whenever I find myself speeding
inches above the graven earth
past bovined paddocks
I long to stop the car
get out
and go and lie down with the cows forever
before climbing into bed
as if I was born knowing
how to unbutton, unlace, unzip
how to slither torso and limbs backwards
out of dark one-way tunnels of cloth
(‘to be gone’)
mandibles of millions of white worms eating the resurrection into being
if I was working
and added
he didn’t mean
writing.
I said
I was sawing
and stacking wood,
tidying the shed,
pruning the hedge,
‘Is that work?’
‘keep it up.’
(‘Keep It Up’)
heart rebels…
the base of the spine
trying to stay
with what it knows
show the bridge how to hold cars
I once lassoed a restaurant
and put it on an aeroplane
like a boat and I’m on deck
roof-top waves rise caught mid-ascent
the wealth of old Dunedin seas
undertowed up North
gold rush away their fault line full
pendant stones for story carving
Peace isn’t made till the bones are showing,
the cliffs are slipping
and the earth roars nasty
(‘And in the yelling of’)
In Vaughan Rapatahana’s most recent collection of poems blood’s a rover, trans-oceanic, as this Maori poet takes us with him from the coast of China to the coast of Thailand, from Nauru and the Philippines, to New Zealand past and present. Home, Away and Elsewhere establishes Rapatahana as a malcontent, or at least a critic, one for whom the intolerable wrestle with words led to a pyrotechnics of typology, in which whirligigs of poems done up in jazzy and playful typeface fonts shuffle and jive their way down the page like zoot-suited dancers in some old-time Auckland dance hall.
age shall not weary them
but
may be
while the steady pall
of roll-your-owns
every Friday
(‘Matakaoa RSA’)
you’re looking at them so hard
they can only stare back,
from thought, from sight.
DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall Review Online.
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