Tuesday Poem: Facing up to it

In this city of furrows, we fall over ourselves

tripping down

Devon Street, tipping down

Bolton,

and a return trip at such

an angle that

our foreheads kiss

the pavement.

Some days, it’s not furrowed at all,

rather

a flung thing that’s caught

the wind:

a blanket,

a swag of kelp, newspaper balled

in

a good-sized fist. On

a good day, it is

all dimples,

this city. Ample, it dips

here,

and here, and here -

the harbour  (the smile )

the place we fall

in.

                        Mary McCallum

I posted this poem right at the start of the Tuesday Poem project, and I was looking at it again after a trip up Bolton Street (I took the photo on the way back down). It's a poem that suits the festive season I think - a cheerful sort of poem with a (smile) in it and dimples. And it's a grateful poem which is partly what the great festivals, like Christmas, are about. 

Although I live on the flat bit on the other side of the harbour now, I am at heart a hill dweller like the two in the photo: what you see is a younger woman (red skirt) and an elderly gentleman who was already on a lean before he hit the incline of Bolton St. 

So Happy Christmas everyone -- and may you have more good days than bad, more smiles than furrows, more poems than not in the coming year. Thank you for coming to visit my blog and the Tuesday Poem blog and I'll be back on deck here in the New Year after a time away at our place in the Wairarapa - a place of flatness and rivers, big sky, sharp blue mountains.

Do please click here for the Tuesday Poem hub and the blissful A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. In the sidebar there, more festive treats from the wonderful bunch of poets that make up TP - the community that I co-ordinate with the help of Claire Beynon in Dunedin.