Highlight: Andrew Bell

National Poetry Day Series

HOUSE OF THE FORGOTTEN

Like time travellers,
we arrived at the boarding house,
rare in our youth and togetherness.
Behind the brave smile
of the white, wooden facade
the men lived like mementoes
in sad, concrete shoeboxes.

It was the nadir of winter
and shadows seeped through the courtyard,
squeezing old lungs with icy fingers
until they wheezed like defective accordions.
In the drab lounge room
television held out its flickering promises to them
as they sat on musty furniture in mustier suits.
The kerosene heater could not dispel
the coldness of their hope.

At six o’clock, we assembled
in the ’50s functional ugliness dining room
where they used the arctic cutlery
to cut each other down to size.
The car accident man whose disfigured face
was reduced to spouting clichés,
the man whose heart was devoured by the bottle,
the man who walked miles every day
but had nowhere to go,
the man whose wife had turned him out
for fear of catching his self-pity
and the friendless young man
who had never learnt to listen.

It seemed almost sinful
to look forward
to the European summer
when some of these men
would die forgotten
in the Australian winter.

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AUTHOR COMMENTARY: In the southern winter of 1987, I was living in a small summer resort town called Mandurah which is on the coast about 72 kilometres south of Perth, Western Australia. I’d turned 30 earlier that year and my partner, Adrienne, and I had been saving hard to travel to the UK and Europe.

In my early 20s, I’d travelled extensively through Southeast and Central Asia with a friend, but neither Adrienne nor I had been to Europe. The lease on our flat expired a couple of weeks before our departure date so we checked into a local boarding house.

Places that revolve around the activities of summer seem especially dreary in winter. Somehow these men seemed to live at the periphery of the happy family image that the town’s authorities liked to cultivate. Perhaps they were cruel to each other because life had been cruel to them.

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TELEMPATHY

Hollywood wouldn’t last five minutes
if an actor said:
“Darling, we’re so wrong for each other.”
But my avant-garde emotions
never scripted good sense.
It’s all experiment and instinct,
fiercely independent of the studio system.
Logic never bankrolled my heart.

“Quiet on the set!”
Cue sound: English modern black soul-R’n’B hybrid.
Roll film and “Action!”

Man driving alone
through Taranaki sharp frosted glass night
trying to enter the dreams
of a woman who sleeps
somewhere in this city.

She has told him there’s no profit in pursuit,
but she might just as well
tell a dog not to have fleas.
He cannot stop
thinking about her.

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AUTHOR COMMENTARY: At the end of 1994, I parted company amicably with my first wife, Adrienne, and returned to my homeland, New Zealand, to be nearer to my aging parents. In 1995, I found myself living in Wellington. I was 38, single again after about ten years and re-adjusting to a society that had changed dramatically in my eight years absence.

I had a lot of strange experiences “searching for a heart”, as Warren Zevon sings so poignantly, and this poem documents one of them. I tried to romance a woman who was a long-time friend of my brother. She wasn’t in a good place emotionally at the time. The quote in line 3 is verbatim.

As a postscript, I met my second wife, Christine, in 1997 and we are happily married with two sons, aged 9 and 13.

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Andrew M. Bell writes poetry, short fiction, plays, screenplays and non-fiction. His work has been published and broadcast in New Zealand/Aotearoa, Australia, England, Israel and USA. His most recent publications are Aotearoa Sunrise, a short story collection, and Clawed Rains, a poetry collection.

Andrew lives in Christchurch with his family and loves to surf. Although poetry and poverty are usually bedfellows, Andrew once won a prize package of $A10,400 in a love poetry competition. More of Andrew’s poetry can be found at Bigger Than Ben Hur.

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For a complete list of National Poetry Day events around the country, go here.

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Highlight: Helen Lowe

National Poetry Day Series

The Wayfarer:  Odysseus at Dodoma

Acorns lie strewn with old leaves, thick
as years beneath the shadow of spreading oaks
where an old woman stoops, picking up sticks
that are no more or less twisted than she, binding
them onto her bent back, and watching with one
bright, blackbird eye as the wayfarer approaches,
an oar balanced across his knotted shoulder, his eyes
narrowed between deep seams, as one who has looked
out to numerous horizons and seen wonders: the moon’s
twinned horns rising from a twilit sea like some mythic
beast, awe and terror bound into the one moment
of seeing – those same eyes strayed now into this land
of low, green hills where the margin of the world
is always close as the line of the next, wooded slope
meeting sky, and where a crone hobbles closer
beneath her load, head twisted up to see him better,
curious as a crow, cackling to think there can be
any burden greater than hers in this world of suffering,
flapping work-worn hands and husking at him
in her cracked voice, bidding him return to the hearth
fire and the home isle, to sit in the sunlit porch
with grandchildren clutching at his knees –
but the wanderer hears only the ravens cawing,
lifting in clouds from the sacred grove, darkening
the sun with their wings, crying out that he is fated,
condemned to roam across sea and land, never
resting or knowing ease until he comes at last
to some far country where salt too is a stranger
and no traveller has ever brought word to those
who dwell there, or led them to imagine
the immeasurable vastness, the restless expanse
of the great ocean, that is the circumference,
the greater part of an unknown world.
© Helen Lowe

Finalist, Takahe National Poetry Competition 2006/ first published Takahe 62

The Wayfarer is part of Helen’s “ITHACA CONVERSATIONS” sequence.

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Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer, and the current Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury. Helen’s first novel,Thornspell, was published to critical praise in the US and her second, The Heir of Night, is published internationally and recently won the International Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012.  The Gathering of the Lost, the second novel in “The Wall of Night” series, is newly published. Helen’s poetry has been published, anthologized, and broadcast in New Zealand and internationally. She posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog, and you can also now follow her on Twitter: @helenl0we

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For a complete list of National Poetry Day events around the country, go here.

Highlight: A J Ponder

National Poetry Day Series

Remember, Remember the Babes in the Wood

I was busy murdering babies –
as you do
the cherub grins
gone
the sapphire-eyed,
dark skinned,
beauties –
all dead.

It’s enough to make a writer cry.
it’s enough
to make
you throw away the pen
tear apart the keyboard,
key,
by stinking key

But,
my babies,
I loved your family
just enough
to see you die
forgotten,
unloved.

Your silent tears
echoing through
to your brothers
and sisters,
as they hang their heads
onto the bloodied page
and weep.

                             -A J Ponder

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AUTHOR COMMENTARY: Often my poems occur when one idea hits another, and not unlike chemistry, or maybe physics, how powerful they are depends very much on how fast the ideas collide and the weight they drag along with them. For a long time before I wrote this piece I’d been contemplating on how exactly to take the literary saying – kill your darlings/kill your babies to the next level. The literal death as opposed to the literary one, and I had the first line, “I was busy murdering babies, as you do -” but it hung there – alone. All my other ideas completely lacked an emotional kick.

I was thinking about this, and my own little cherubs when they were young – somehow whenever they were upset “The Babes in the Wood” poem always sprang to mind, and of course that leads to Hansel and Gretel and the tragic parental choice of watching your children starve to death or letting them die alone in the wood. Fortunately I’ve never had to make a choice that difficult, but it was exactly the emotional kick I needed and the poem tumbled out – albeit a little roughly. After all how fair would that be to write a poem about editing and then not have to do the hard yards?

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A J Ponder is a member of the Tuesday Poem hub with her blog, An Affliction of Poetry. She likes to experiment with shape, style, rhyme and rhythm, often harking back to traditional styles. Best known for her children’s stories she most recently won the Sir Julius Vogel Best Short Story Award 2012 for Frankie and the Netball Clone. This year she was also runner up for the Arc 1.2 competition, The Future Always Wins, with a “gown up” story, ‘Dying for the Record’.

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For a complete list of National Poetry Day events around the country, go here.