About whales
September 6, 2011
Stranded
Huge rubber torpedoes loose themselves onto shore;
a giant’s speed-humps beached. Incomprehensible,
these commas in a language no-one knows to speak.
Like sheep they follow each other, but no canny dog
can turn them, head them back to deep supporting sea.
Victims of gravity, bulk weighs them down,
and spread of sand becomes a massy grave.
That short word why grows in watchers’ minds,
pressing like the bodies on that fatal beach.
No answer comes. We water them like giant bulbs,
and strain to plant them back in bed of ocean.
But sometimes there can be just too much coast.
Unseen sirens called them, and some turned back
to dire, heavy death. Lapped by waves,
gentle as a fading memory, what do whales see
in that final surge, before their spirits swim away?
P.S. Cottier
Trail of disinformation
August 18, 2011
Must find accent key...
Trail of disinformation
P.S. Cottier
‘Does it really matter, love? After all, we’re talking about a snail, aren’t we? I put down bait for them. Or squash them. It’s them or my veggies.’ Bill smiled, ate a peanut, and drank a little more beer.
‘It’s a special snail. A green one. Tiny.’ I sounded vaguely desperate, and I knew it.
‘But it’s still a snail, green, orange or purple. Rainbow even. I just don’t see the point, worrying about an ugly little bugger like that.’
Bill had hit the nail, or the snail shell, on the head. We were just talking about ‘ugly little buggers’. We wanted to prevent the development of a proposed mine because of the presence of rare miniature green snails, only found in one small pocket of rain-forest. If it were koalas, once the subject of a bounty, we would have been national heroes. A rare species of bird would be understandable. Everyone can see beauty in a bird. But a mollusc is quite a different kettle of fish. Too far beneath our eyes to count. Too near our feet.
It was Jennifer, my best friend and fellow conservationist, who came up with the idea to give our campaign to save the habitat of the endangered snail a certain indefinable…je ne sais quoi.
I knew we were onto a winner the next time I ran into Bill at the pub. He was reading the newspaper, the one that Jennifer had just leaked her ‘secret information’ to. It trembled in his hands. I noticed that he wasn’t smiling, or cracking jokes like errant carapaces amongst the beans. Indeed, he seemed a little angry, a little red in the face.
Bill turned the paper over so I could read the article he had just read. I had to cover my nascent smile as I read:
‘French offer to take Aussie snails
This paper has heard that an offer has been made, through official channels, for all the endangered miniature green snails in the area currently being considered for the development of a new mine to be removed and relocated to France, at the expense of the French Government. It is hoped that the species may prove edible.’
‘Bloody cheek’, said Bill, as he took a long drink of beer. ‘They’ve got their own snails. Poor little buggers. Why do they want to steal ours?’
He’d forgotten his previous comments about pellets and gardening. We had wrapped the miniature green snail in the flag, rendered it as Australian as the kangaroo. We eat them, but that’s different, apparently.
Despite vigorous denials from the French embassy, the story stuck. The public was outraged. Next week, the Government officially declared the snail habitat protected.
And deep in the bush, the tiny snails act out their slimy lives, safe from the development of a new tin mine. And of course, safe from any forced repatriation to the restaurant rich and risky boulevards of Paris.
Exporting pain
June 22, 2011
I wrote this poem about three years ago, and it seems like a good time to post it here. There is a push in Australia to ban live exports of sheep and cattle to countries where Australia has no real control over the conditions in which they are slaughtered (i.e. everywhere else but here). This is truly a horrible industry; not just because of the methods of slaughter often being unregulated but because of the long confinement that any trip from Australia necessarily involves. Here is a link to one of the sites pushing to have the trade banned.
It was quite predictable that there would be an outburst of stories featuring ‘honest Aussie farmers’ whose living is being threatened by ‘animal activists’. It’s unfortunate if anyone is really hurt financially, but it’s simply unacceptable that we are raising animals that are then being being tortured to death once exported. Kill the animals here, under proper religious supervision where necessary, and don’t turn a conveniently blind eye to the suffering of sentient creatures. I am a vegetarian, but there is no neutrality on this issue. Many meat-eaters have also been appalled to learn of the treatment of cattle in some foreign slaughter-houses, and the response to recently released video of conditions in some Indonesian abattoirs has reached far beyond the usual groups of animal rights supporters.
Any method of killing animals causes suffering, but this must be minimised, if people insist on eating them. The test for whether an industry is humane is ‘how would people feel if it was thousands of dogs being exported and killed like this?’ Imagine filling a container vessel with dogs and shipping them to, say, China to face a slow and painful death. What’s the difference with sheep and cattle? Oh, yes, that’s right. They’re not ‘pets’. Just animals. Delightfully logical. Enough rant, here’s the poem.
Global farms
Stock cubes
are sent to sea, flavoursome squares
of mutton flesh and bone, seasoning,
woolly sardines.
Between pasture and knife
the blue stretches, and the yellow,
as rivers soak downwards,
contained in time.
No truck of guilt to turn from,
met on sudden road. Squalor
bleats over dollar’s equator,
safely unseen.
P.S. Cottier
10 words, 2 days and a flock
June 17, 2011
I recently competed in an interesting competition run by a Canadian journal, Contemporary Verse 2. They give a list of ten words, and punters (who must have pre-registered) have two days to create a poem which contains every word. I sometimes like doing this type of thing as it stops me from falling in a rut, and if the result is less than wonderful, it doesn’t really matter.
I was very pleased to receive an honourable mention, particularly as I found myself writing about cockatoos; hardly something that the average Canadian would see stripping the bark from maple trees on a daily basis, or resting on the antlers of moose. Actually I know that Canada, like Australia, is overwhelmingly urban, so please excuse my tired and narrow stereotypes. (Is there such a thing as a vibrant and broad stereotype?) Here in Canberra cockatoos are as common as sparrows. If not commoner, which is remarkable given how many foreign birds have been released in this country over the past 200 years.
I won’t put the poem up here, as I can’t remember if I granted exclusive e-rights for a time to CV2 (probably not) but here is a link to the poem about cockatoos, imaginatively entitled ‘Cockatoos‘.
Muse with beak
Reading the other poems is fascinating; they are so good that I forgot that they had to contain the magic ten words. And the other poems were mostly urban.
Really urban, not Canberra urban.
Taking my vocabulary for a walk
February 15, 2011
I was taking my vocabulary for a walk the other day when it brought back this poem! On this walk, my vocab. was more a poodle than a pitbull, and as it loves showing off, I decided to please it by publishing the rather silly poem here.
13 words that should be in a poem
Tintinnabulate, with no little white dog.
Albedo, a lemon wedge of sun, no gin.
Froufrou whispering of salons most Prousty
Overheard by stuffy disapproving frowzy.
Bilby, because they’re far better than rabbits.
Gubernatorial, before the Republic erupts!
Autochthonous ditto, when we ditch the Poms,
Just like the Indians, with bulk pappadoms.
Papillae and papillote, for nice soft curly fingers.
Isostasy threatened by two in that line I just writ.
Tectonic as panic rocks this poem’s solidity,
But I pulled it together. Quite sylleptically.
P.S. Cottier
Bad dog! Bad! Go back and find something more lyrical!
PS Cottier 