Christmas poem: Burning the donkey
December 22, 2024
We were suspicious from the start.
What decent man brings a wife
pregnant as a pudding
into a new country, unless
he wants the child to be
a kind of hidden penny,
a nice little earner?
She was obviously mad,
whispering something about
a visitation, from behind
an annoying, coy blue veil.
We weren’t sure if she meant
secret police (who are unbelievably
common, in the places these people
supposedly come from,
breeding like cane-toads
in their vivid crops of lies).
She mentioned flashes and wings.
As I said, a few bats short of an attic.
He even admitted that he wasn’t sure
if the kid was his, or at least
that’s what we think he said.
It was hard to source a proper interpreter,
if, indeed, the language was real,
rather than a melange of all things foreign,
stirred like another pudding,
to be tongued off a soon-to-be silver spoon.
Mike said he thought Aramaic
was a perfume for men,
and we all had a good laugh,
but there was absolutely no whiff of that,
I can assure you.
It turned out to be a boy,
born in necessary seclusion,
though Mike said all the lights
turned themselves on
the moment the kid drew breath.
That was undeniably weird,
and a further example
of their lack of thanks
expressed in clever sabotage.
Lawyers even brought in presents,
breaching clear regulations.
Their poor excuse for a boat,
which had evaded all detection
and wound its feral ways to Darwin
despite navy, barnacles, tides and policy,
overladen with stink and sick and
God knows what else,
was towed back out and burnt.
All in all it was nothing remarkable,
although my skin is itching,
itching like an alien.
A nice little souvenir, no doubt about it.
The press should really leave it alone,
and focus on some bigger issues －
a Test begins tomorrow.
PS Cottier
This retelling of the nativity story, set in modern day immigration detention and narrated by a guard, was first published in Verity La in 2017, and later in my book Utterly.
“And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”
(Illustration by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo)
Tuesday poem: The paisley pitbull
December 11, 2024
Each bark is Mozart sweet. Silver flutes
are nothing to the improvised flow
of furry sax buried in soft-toffee bay.
His teeth are crochet hooks. Bites bloom
into perennial tattoos, scars in winter
flutter into hollyhocks come spring.
The cat and the kid eat from his bowl,
sip his milk and crunch his kibble,
and the robin plucks hairs for her nest.
He turns three times three before rest,
and apostrophic patterns erupt
as the canine chameleon settles.
Nightbulls may gore; Pamplonas
still run through his veins,
ghost-genes there in blood’s bottle.
But paisley outs. Stretching into dawn,
he shakes off hard history like dew,
and noses, bee-soft, into day.
PS Cottier
This is an old poem, which first appeared in my chapbook Quick bright things: Poems of fantasy and myth (Ginninderra Press, 2016). The dog in the picture was only six back then; now she’s nearer to fifteen.
The poem touches on myths about pitbulls, which can be as affectionate and gentle as any other breed of dog.
Reviews and sniffer dogs
November 18, 2024
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin has attracted some thoughtful and positive reviews.
Firstly at Compulsive Reader, where Magdalena Ball wrote the first review of the book. She calls it ‘quirky and strangely haunting’. Secondly, at The Australian. This one is behind a paywall, but the reviewer, Jack Marx, uses phrases like ‘so unusually brilliant’ and states that ‘There is not a bad chapter in The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, and a delight of some sort – usually many – on every page.’ It’s enough to make an author blush! Seriously.
In other news, a poem I entered in The Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing was commended, which is great. I am working on a short manuscript about dogs, and the poem was about sniffer dogs. You can read the winners here. And here is my poem. And a dog.
Ardent nose
We sniff our way through violence,
the dropped hat or jeans removed,
splatters on grass, the blood-crumbs,
we call them among ourselves.
Some of us disinter computers containing
hidden quests for poisonous feasts.
Here a soupçon of arsenic, there
a sprinkle of fentanyl, adding spice,
designed to remove a troublesome life.
Recipes rarely handed down.
Others detect stashes of drugs,
or cash converted from same,
secreted behind hasty plaster walls.
Our indications cause such a havoc
of mattocks, a stucco snowstorm.
We are taken outside, in case we eat
those attractive disentombed baggies
neatly counted into incriminating piles,
photographed and fussed over.
We’d rather be out after truffles,
chase sticks and toys, roll in dung,
but we sense delight when we unearth
what your dodgy senses cannot catch.
Your poor excuses for olfaction
are unable to detect screams of scent
slapping the face of the air.
My friend, the springer spaniel,
trained from a floppy ball of pup,
all long hair, tongue and wag,
tastes the cadaver air, helps reveal
the buried answer to a search —
for don’t all dogs love bones?
Long before your Poirots or Bosches,
your Holmes after that fog-bound hound,
we sleuths found what you could not find,
found the worst of humankind.
We barked, or sat, and simply waited
for you to finally catch us up.
PS Cottier
Note: The word sleuth derives from slough dog or sleuth-hound, a bloodhound once found in Scotland.
Budgies and shortlisting
October 1, 2024
Budgerigar
Ten million green commas punctuate blue sky,
quick breaths of swooping wonder, multiplied.
Water-hole is your target; liquid rope pulls you down
and the whole emerald sky is falling, diving,
as miniature bodies scoop into pool.
Your individual markings have taken you
further than native flight; outside the Louvre
I saw you, cold, trying to break in, as pointillist
as Pissarro but acrylic in your finish.
A proud but damp escapee from French balcony,
regretting the lost seed and the found liberty.
So plump and fresh, I have heard you were good eating,
a winging fast food charred to a turn;
as far from stringy battery chook as fingers in the fire.
Most know you singly; whistling in cages,
bowing and bobbing, rattling plastic mirrors.
Driven mad you ring and ring chink-chinky bells
or make love to that hard, hard-to-get reflection.
What joy to see you
just once, as you swoop,
one stitch amongst the tapestry,
a blade of grass in feathered turf carpet, magically landing,
transforming dreary waterside with that fallen sward of Eire.
Swift dragon of twenty million wings,
fluorescing with your simple, beak-filled joys.
PS Cottier
I have just returned from Boulia, in Queensland, about 300 km from Mount Isa, where I finally saw budgies in the wild. These have been my main target bird for ages, but they’ve always avoided me. We also saw wild cockatiels, which was wonderful.
***
In less ornithological news, I have two works shortlisted in separate national competitions. Firstly, my book Tuesday’s Child is Full (In Case of Emergency Press) is shortlisted for the Society of Women Writers (NSW) Book Awards for Poetry. This one is announced at a ceremony Sydney in late November.
Secondly, The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, a novella manuscript co-written with NG Hartland, has been shortlisted for the 20/40 prize, run by publishers Finlay Lloyd. The main prize for this one is publication, so it will be a very exciting announcement later this month.
Tuesday poem: Orange-bellied parrots 2123
November 28, 2023
Orange-bellied parrots, 2123 Neophema chrysogaster They are bigger than budgerigars, but have never been as numerous. A scant handful survived in 2023, and smart orange bellies seemed to be flashing a caution, a more-than-amber pause, about to fall into a red stop, forever. How many birds must there be for an official murmuration? We don’t know, but just yesterday, we counted one hundred or more, here, at Warn Marin/Western Port. The shrubs whistled as if brave cicadas, had flown over Bass Strait, not these brilliant, blue-browed, blue-winged birds. Their song was almost lost to the air’s ear. Now we can vouch for its weirdness. The heath has not felt beaks tearing off so much fruit for years. Tree hollows must be back way down South, (or a thousand hand-crafted boxes) just enough for breeding, enough for a murmur, if not a murmuration. They don’t move en masse, though, it must be noted, but improvise, jazzy, in ones and threes. They light up the bushes like Christmas lights, the bellies seen, then hidden in green-grey leaves, switched on and off by foraging. We hear that some have been seen as far North as Sydney. That may be a rumour, a hopeful mistake, and yet, we saw one hundred. How many make a murmuration? PS Cottier
Parrots don’t form murmurations, like starlings, for example. (Perhaps budgies do? I have never seen them in the wild.) I was lucky enough to see a murmuration of native metallic starlings in Far North Queensland recently. But I like the idea of seeing enough of such a rare bird as the Orange-bellied parrot to even think of the word ‘murmuration’ in regard to them. Will they still be around in 100 years? I hope so, and that is what this unusually optimistic poem (for me) envisages.
And as we move towards Christmas, there’s a passing reference to that season here.
PS Cottier 