Tuesday Poem: Pink T-Shirt

he liked to arrive at her door
ring the bell and wait

to see her face above him at the window
the eyes widen, the mouth an oh!

look through the keyhole
to see the joy of her

running down the stairs in a pink t-shirt
cupping each large unruly breast

not enough hands
to stop the smile on her face

                                    
                                   Mary McCallum


I wrote this poem over twenty years ago living in London. It is a true story told to me by my best friend's boyfriend. Sandra, my friend, was and remains to this day the personification of that gorgeous thing we call 'joy'.

Looking at the poem now, I see how slight it is and I am tempted to tinker, but to do that twenty years on makes it no longer 'Pink T-Shirt' but something else. It's as if lying in a folder with other unpublished poems all this time has set the words as jelly sets - it is no longer liquid to be stirred. I'm okay with that.

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Naming Ned

One Sunday in February I went for a walk with my lovely friend, Alexandra, and her son Ned aged five (pictured). It was a sunny day and we walked down from their house into a small and leafy valley. Every now and then, Sandra would pause and point out something she wanted to show me: a kowhai seedling beside a painted stake; a hillside dense with native shrubs; a young rimu with its narrow sloping branches.

From looking at the path, listening to Ned's chatter, talking about something or other, I had to pause. What Sandra was pointing at came into focus and was framed. I saw it when before I hadn't, and what's more I saw it with her eyes. It grew as I watched it. An ordinary section of bush or a shrub or a seedling took shape, beckoned, became meaningful. Was named.

It struck me all of a sudden that this is what a writer does when she writes a story.

Another revelation came when Ned said, 'I'm going the quickest way' and rushed off to take a short-cut just like the six-year-old Billy in The Blue. I stole the phrase from a six-year-old boy who walked with me on Arapawa Island when I was researching the novel five years ago, but haven't heard it since. Ned's spitting out the exact same words in the same circumstances as a child of my invention was one of those meta-fictional moments which disoriented me briefly.

Of course, the truth is small boys the world over (and whatever era) are black and white, and absolute. So macho and yet so deliciously children. It has to be the quickest way and not merely the quicker way. And I am thrilled to think that Billy - after 18 months or so inside the pages of my book - is still acting the way a real boy should.