Tuesday Poem: To Say

the first flutter of fledgling on the grass -
feathers new, askew, softly now,
ungainly thing

the first flutter of pencil on the page, to say
what the fledgling asks to be said, softly
now, ungainly thing

the first flutter of knife on wood, to say
what the fledgling asks to be said, softly
now, ungainly thing

the first flutter of needle on linen, to say
what the fledgling asks to be said, softly
now, ungainly thing

the first flutter of fledgling on the grass, ungainly - soon
to be gainly - thing, feathers new, askew, softly
now, so says the fledgling


                                                     mary mccallum

As part of the Tuesday Poem Secret Santa this week I am paired with Emma McCleary who is the webmaster for Booksellers New Zealand. A poet appreciator rather than a poet herself, Emma posts work by NZ poets on the website every Tuesday. So this Tuesday, in our Secret Santa swop, Emma is posting a poem of mine - and I have no idea which one it will be... (exciting!)

For my side of the bargain, I decided that rather than use one of the poems by NZers Emma has stashed away for her website, I would use something of Emma's. She is a wonderful printmaker and craftswoman, so I decided to use one of her prints here - and write a poem off the back of it.

Like Emma, I am very partial to birds, and with the birds nests full of cheeping young at the moment, and fledglings hopping in an ungainly fashion through the undergrowth (the word 'fledgling' alone is so evocative, and such mouth-filler),  I couldn't go past Emma's print 'First Flutter' pictured above and available to buy at Solander Gallery. The poem that goes with it is about art and how we try in our various media - Emma and I and others - to evoke that thing we see, or at least the thisness of the thing. But how any evocation is only ever that, and not the real thing at all.

A great way to end the Tuesday Poem year. For more Tuesday Poems go here or click on the quill in the sidebar. James Brown is featured at the hub and then there are 30 poets from all over with poems on offer....

Merry Christmas to you Emma and all the other Tuesday Poets and all my loyal blog readers. See you again in 2011.

Tuesday Poem: Notorious Veins

grain-y

thing clapp

-ing its

tin-y

hands see

the small

screen see

it pulses

it claps

its ti

-ny hands

shadows

like nost-

rils go in

out

no, not a

baby, love,

not hands

this is

cardiac

care

this

a beating

heart

*

he says the buzzer whoops like a small siren and then there’s the running and the voices crying out like they do in a rugby match ‘come on, Tony, you can do it’, then something slapping on skin and the distant sound of clapping ‘Tony, come on’

*

he says

when it’s quiet

the nurse comes and sits 

in the chair by his bed

Beth in pink fimo on her

chest, and

she slips off her shoe

and rubs the ball of her

bad foot

*

one night she talks about how the chopper

brought Tony in with his cap still on his head,

and when she took it off he’d blinked so fast

she thought he would never stop

he’d wanted to talk about the two women he loved

and how neither of them knew,

and two sons that disappointed,

and his one wish that he’d taken up flying

I wanted to fly too, my father says

he said to Beth, and he told her about sitting

all the exams but how he was too tall

for the plane so he had to go to Africa

*

another night, he describes the smell of Erinmore Flake

when he opened the tin: all honey and smokey – taking

that first fingerful – packing it into the bowl of his pipe

*

other facts he shares while Beth kneads her foot:

the dark high ceilings of the kafenion off Syndagma Square

where his father played cards, the Greek record my mother

was playing when they first met, the children and grandchildren:

their names, the colour of their hair

lastly, his disappointing veins – the way they refuse

to yield blood no matter who tries

*

(I know none of this for a fact, I’m only guessing)

*

we see Beth with her trolley:  

she walks with us to my father’s

cubicle – you must be Mary

the writer, she says, and this

is your daughter, Isabel

when we reach the bed,

the fimo badge heaves

on the mountainous bosom,

and she takes his arm

with its notorious veins, and slips

in the needle no trouble at all –

I know you, her fingers say,

I know the

grain

-y

se

     crets

of

your

beat-

ing

heart

Mary McCallum

For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill in the sidebar. The hub poem is Alistair Te Ariki Campbell's To Stuart chosen by editor Robert Sullivan. 

Tuesday Poem: The Wahine

Photo acknowledged to the Dominion and Sunday Times newspapers. Published on The Wahine website The Wahine Sunk by a storm, April 1968 walking alone you hear all of it every power pole a-crackle with cicadas, the sea rattling stones in raw hands, weatherboard houses crying rust, a dog hoarse at the end of its chain, the groaning of a half-built boat,                               where the gate is where the sealed road ends, where the coarse hills fall to their knees, where the sky pours into a bay as deep as houses, where we stopped once to see the savaged sheep, marvelled at the blood on the white wool, the twist of its neck, where there’s the pull and push of the Strait and the rocks bend dumbly to take it, in the small suck between pull and push –   the sound of the truck that day labouring on the shingle the loose shoe falling                                           Mary McCallum Photo caption: 'Steward Frank Hitchens lies shoe-less and unconscious on the back of a Landrover making its way north along the Pencarrow road, his legs hanging over the rear of the vehicle... Burdan's Gate, where ambulances were parked and waiting, is about a kilometre ahead. Note the condition of the road. Survivors on foot, most without shoes, had to walk for miles through rock debris washed down from the hills by the rain and thrown up by the seas.' [Thanks to the Wahine website for this.] * Frank Hitchens was one of the lucky ones. In his story on The Wahine website, (scroll down), he notes that 47 of the 223 people thrown up on the rocks and beaches along this coastline were killed.  I walk this road regularly as I live nearby. My brother turned one the day before the storm that claimed the Wahine. I was at school, we were sent home. My father was a radio and TV reporter so he spent the day reporting on events. A friend, Steve, broke through the police cordon and ran to help the people coming ashore. He saved lives.  The day the Wahine went down, is one of those days in Wellington where you know exactly what you were doing.  Do visit the Tuesday Poem hub for a fabulous poem about dance written by Jo Thorpe,  and links, via the live blog roll, to a stack more Tuesday Poems.