Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Tuesday Poem: Ferry Road, Tuesday


Back from a walk to the ridge
and all the way up we'd watched
the weather coming in across the harbour

and by weather, I mean
a breath like a peppermint-eating cyclist,
nothing, and then suddenly something

fresh and light at your shoulder, and all
the way up we'd turned
and turned again to see it coming

its line drawn and redrawn in the water
closer     each    time
and how fast we walked

to be ahead -- to the top of Ferry Road
and onto the track through the new
growing spindly things and the crocheted

spider webs and the splash of rata
and push of green and the confetti
of beech leaves on the rise and

fall --

up and
up --

'There,' I said at last, as we stood
looking back at the weather again, half
the water crinkled now -- an old man

smiling, 'is where the pa of Te Hiha stood
he could see anything coming --
the whole

of the harbour.'

We'd left the beach in stillness, and
returned to a stiff breeze. 

Mary McCallum

Poem revised May 22

Tuesdays are my poem days and my bush-walking days, but not today (sadly) for the walking -  I have a meeting to get to. Poems, yes. Tuesday is always Tuesday Poem day for me and has been for three years. After you've read 'me' - do go to the Tuesday Poem hub to read a wonderful poem by a poet who is UK born to Guyanese parents - Fred D'Aguiar. I read his poem before I started on my poem again last night  (written a couple of weeks ago and left to brew) - I think my poem is talking to D'Aguiar's don't you? The title especially. 

Monday, May 6, 2013

Tuesday Poem: The Summer Day by Mary Oliver [a reading]



Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
                                                   Mary Oliver

These two wonderful lines - the  last two lines of Oliver's 'The Summer Day' -  are the perfect preface to a novel I just reviewed today for Radio NZ:  Isabel Allende's Maya's Notebook. Which is why it's on my mind.

What better question could there be? In fact, the whole of the poem is a wonderful thing. It's about the art of paying attention - showing 'love', in effect - and thereby transforming both the thing we pay attention to and ourselves. Which is what Isabel Allende believes and is in evidence, in all its glory, in her most recent novel.