Tuesday poem: Après le sable
August 12, 2024
Will the Iron Lady, her ample metal skirt
spreading like the nineteenth century,
miss the glimpse of two-piece sport
when women pushed a ball over a net
planted in a sudden burst of beach?
Will she recall spectators’ stands?
Will she dream of that quick-built strand?
PS Cottier
Image by Maksim Sokolov, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
I've been glutting on sport lately, both AFL (live) and the Olympics (at ungodly hours). I particularly liked the huge weightlifters (and the wee ones), the wrestlers, and the beach volleyball, in the wonderful stadium on the Champ de Mars. This poem is about that sport.
At least the footy is still going!
Tuesday poem: via link
July 17, 2024
I just had a poem published at Eye to the Telescope, called “Stuffed Koala and Other Cocktails of the Near Future”. The theme of this issue, edited by Gretchen Tessmer, is Strange Mixology, and it’s well worth a tipple. Here’s a link to the issue, scroll down for my poem. This publication is run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, based in the US.
Poem: All praise the cut-off gloves
June 29, 2024
In cut-off gloves I can cup
my phone; the oblong light,
and message and swipe
just as I would with only
pale thin gloves of skin.
The poetry anthology,
just arrived from Adelaide,
can be flicked in cut-off gloves.
The flat white slowly sipped,
the essential bling displayed
on cool growths of fingers.
Those crops of pink asparagus,
embedded in the cut-off gloves
sprout towards the glowing words,
etiolated, and punctuated
by the warming medium
in which I plant them.
This very poem can be written
in what it seeks to praise —
woollen, orange, cut-off gloves.
And stuff these Canberra days.
PS Cottier
I know that the image doesn’t really fit the poem, but I like it so much that I had to use it. This is an old poem, from 2016, first published at Project 365 + 1 (Project 366), where I wrote a poem a day for 30 days.
I think fingerless gloves are also called Fagins, after Dickens’s character, but the illustrations I found of Fagin did not sport gloves. Here are the gloves to which the poem is addressed:
Poem: Nyx and Neon
January 21, 2024
The darkness and its dreams
have been tossed out like bottle caps,
or plastic wrappers, illuminated
into nothingness. Old goddesses
swapped for this new electricity,
these garish sharp scars flashing.
Neon is the worst, an intoxicating
brightness. He was recently elevated
to a minor god. I curse his vulgar
yellow slaps upon the face
of the sleeping earth, his bold
assertion of light when all
should give themselves to rest.
Newness needs to be won,
rebirthed at dawn, not lost
in this glut of fluorescence,
snarling through the black.
But I am Nyx, and I know —
Neon can never reach
the human’s rest of death.
There nothing disturbs the mud,
except the damp, and the quiet,
thorough recycling of the worms,
palest pink yet avid.
PS Cottier
Nyx personifies night, and was the goddess of the night. Neon was discovered in 1898, and is a ‘noble gas’, although Nyx doesn’t see it that way in my poem.
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 