Giant ship-mushrooms in Sydney!!!
February 22, 2010
Just a Captain Cook*
Slick, fertile pages of ever-sunny blooming brochures
slip through her avid fingers. She dreams, charts and plots
trips she can never take. From these drifting mind-spores
she grows a giant ship-mushroom and visits hot-spots;
deep-tanned Fiji, jungly Vanuatu and accented ‘France
of the Pacific’, the model thin, elegant exclamation
of la Nouvelle Calédonie. Oh, the tight clenched dance
she dances, the deep-shelf oceanic love she finds, from
one sun-bathing island to the next! Tough travel agents
recognise addiction, her joyous, fungal procrastination,
and refuse to meet those longing, sea-kissed eyes. Graven
idols, their books are like shiny trinkets flogged at micro-nations.
She knows, they know, she can’t go; only sigh and contemplate
the spiced salad of rain-forest, and the waltz of ideal mate.
P.S. Cottier
*Captain Cook is rhyming slang for look.
the wealth of poetry
January 25, 2010
I don’t mean filthy lucre, or even clean lucre for that matter…
I was just thinking about where writing poetry and short stories has taken me over the last year, since I started this blog:
In Melbourne, I received a brass horse for a poem about Adam Lindsay Gordon (a famous Oz poet of the nineteenth century, buried at Westminster Abbey in London);
I went to Sydney for the Society of Women Writers biennial book awards, in which my book The Glass Violin was highly commended, AND I WON THE LUCKY DOOR PRIZE!!!;
Recently I was back in Victoria for the inaugural tango poetry prize and saw a beautiful dance based on the winning poem by Charles D’Anastasi;
I have read my work a few times in in Canberra (including an extra short story at the launch of A Quiet Day), and once in Cooma, and a poem by me was read in Wangaratta at the jazz festival as part of the launch of the latest extempore journal;
My electronic pixies have whizzed around the world like Ariel, taking my words to places I have never been and may well never go.
I hope this year sees me spinning rhymes and prose like Rumpelstiltskin on amphetamines, without any impatient Princes of reason knocking at the door.
The atheist at Christmas
December 1, 2009
First published in ‘The Mozzie’, Queensland, last December:
The atheist at Christmas
Yes, I wish for more, more than these tottering temples,
these building blocks of presents under this most
European plastic tree, dropping leaves unseasonably.
If only it were possible, to unwrap belief, to kiss it quick
like an unexpected guest under mistletoe’s sharply
convenient hangover marriage.
But God is an idea too far, too gaudy, too stuffed,
fills a void of longing with crumbs unreasonably.
The brain must talk turkey, (or mouth gobble on).
Faith desire shines each new born December,
but frail batteries barely make month’s end.
By then it will have broken down.
And then be gone.
P.S. Cottier
Seconds?
November 17, 2009
I’ve just had a second book published by Ginninderra Press (see blogroll), a collection of short stories called A Quiet Day. To be launched in December by Peter Frankis.
Launching books
atmosphere pulls
pages flutter
Really, perhaps I should leave haiku alone and stick to quirky free verse, which seems to be my forté. And super-short stories with twisty possum tails. Have you noticed that no-one says that anything is their piano, let alone pianissimo, as in something they’re hopeless at?
Novels were her pianissimo,
Crushing her in bulk,
smalling her to modesty.
She slams the covers on her fingers.
Enough. Blogging is the new nicotine.
Dear NASA
October 22, 2009
Ths poem recently won first prize in the C.J. Dennis Literary Awards (Auburn, South Australia) on the theme The Universe: Yours to Explore. Such an overwhelming topic seemed to call out for a little humour:
Dear NASA,
When we reach Mars, kicking up red dust,
walking against gusts like Marcel Marceau,
let’s not do what we did on the Moon,
forty leap and leap-less years ago.
Let us not plant any one nation’s flag,
like a toothpick through a lump of party cheese.
Might a woman set her feet first on the planet
so often connected with war? And please,
please, no one takes golf clubs, whether niblicks
putters, drivers or irons. Let Mars stay a place
untouched by sprees of futility, no heady sticks
to launch tiny white balls into circles of space.
Leave no junk; let the plains spread clearly.
Just a few thoughts from
yours, sincerely.
P.S. Cottier
PS Cottier 