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Tuesday Poem: Orphans by Michele Amas

We are losing our parents,
3 mothers of friends
this month, like a middle-age 

phase we’re going through. 
The aunts and uncles
too, my name I see 

beside the telephone
of one,
I’m down as next of kin 

beside the lawyer
Mr Dick Crush, 
I don’t know 

which is more ridiculous. 
Under the blankets
I calculate the cost 

of death and travel. 
You are in the wardrobe
trying to trap 

a mouse with your shoes. 
It’s hopeless I say
where are the adults 

when you need them. 
I’m still standing on the beach
in my togs and bermuda shorts 

waiting for the parents 
to find
a park 

You can hear Michele read Orphans here. She is an actor and director as well as a poet, so this woman knows how to read a poem. She did the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters the same year I did, but Michele's collection of poems won the Adam Prize for best folio. It is a damn fine collection published as After the Dance (VUP 2005) and shortlisted for the Best Book of Poetry at the Montana NZ Book Awards. She's just returned from Menton where her partner, Ken Duncum, was the Katherine Mansfield fellow. 

Here's an earlier post on Michele's poetry, especially her marvellous Daughter.  

One very good reason for posting Orphans: I have a good friend who has just lost her father, and she's not the only one. We met up with another friend in the same position when we were having coffee, and she said straight up: 'We are orphans.' They talked about the strangeness of not having parents in the world, now or ever (something that hasn't yet happened to me). That feeling of wondering where the adults are when you need them. 

When I read the last five lines of Orphans, I am immediately at Scorching Bay the summer I was 11. Radios. The smell of sunblock. People on towels. Feet burnt by melting tarmac. Waiting for Dad to find a park. And when he does Mum will plaster us in sunblock and open a book and read until it's time to unpack the picnic. Dad will let us three hang onto his broad back, and he'll take us out past the rock pools into deep water. 

Dad, don't let go. And looking back there's Mum safe on the beach, waving, and here's Dad, his big hands pushing the water away, oblivious to my brothers trying to shove each other off. I'm hanging on as tight as I can. Everything right then seems immense and good. 

This poem is posted here with permission of the author - thanks Michele. Do check out another wonderful poem at the Tuesday Poem hub by award-winning NZ poet Brian Turner. Just click on the QUILL in the sidebar. Then from there, there are 30 poets with Tuesday Poems .... 

Daughter

Golden Delicious

She is sunny
she is sunny side up, my girl
running to meet me.
The other girls look lumpy
with their slumping shoulders
dyed hair and regrowth.
But my one is a beautiful apple
rolling down the drive
out past the school gates.

These are some lines from one of my favourite poems Daughter by Michele Amas. Daughters - or one particular daughter - are on my mind at the moment. The poem was in Michele's collection After the Dance (VUP 2005) which was shortlisted for a Montana, and selected for Best NZ Poems 2005.

Michele says her poems are inspired by what she hears; and like all good actors, she's an eavesdropper. I love that about her work. It resonates with the busyness of people: the things they say and do to fend off and cope with and love the world and each other.

In Best NZ Poems, it says Michele's shift from acting to writing poetry 'came out of a desire to speak from her own script rather than someone else’s.' She says:

‘Acting is a great way to escape yourself, to ignore yourself, and when I stopped for a while there was this chattering going on in my head that I’d never heard before, so I just started taking notes.’

“Daughter” was written out of a desperation to contain a myriad of emotions that living with a teenager forces you to experience daily. In this poem I have attempted to describe the shifting emotional landscape that a mother and child stumble into, quite out of the blue, both unprepared and bewildered – full of blame and guilt, need and love.’'

Read the whole poem online here.