Tuesday poem: Greyhounds release
July 25, 2016
Greyhounds release
Let them run —
but run as they would
chasing the wind or their mate
not a screeching curl-tailed baton
flung round the track
in a circular curse.
And let them live —
just as long as greyhounds live
not dispatched for slowness
and spaded into the bush
in a quotidian slaughter
nose to tail, tail to nose.
P.S. Cottier
So weird to find myself agreeing with a Liberal government…But the Baird Government is right in banning greyhound racing. (As is the Labor — with a sprinkling of Green — ACT government.) No decision is ever totally pure, but this ‘sport’ is undeniably cruel, and the sooner it is abolished, the better.
To all those whinging about the attack on the working man (and it is usually categorised in that gender specific way) that the ban represents; note that there is something incredibly insulting in this thinking. Working class does not mean cruel and unthinking, and unable to act ethically. Most people with pet dogs would shudder to think of them being treated in the way this industry has treated greyhounds (and other animals used as live bait) for years.
My PhD on images of animals in the works of Charles Dickens touched on the history of the RSPCA, and around the time it was created, there were people mounting exactly the same arguments against bans on cock-fighting and the like, categorising such activities as important recreations for the working man. Implying that the ‘working man’ is necessarily a brutal moron.
The NSW Labor Party, in defending the greyhound racing industry, is showing that it is pathetically out of touch with anything progressive.
The ban, which comes into effect 1 July next year, does open up thinking about how we treat other animals, and that has to be a positive development. Go, you good thing!
(I know there probably should be an apostrophe in the title, but it looked so bad I removed it. Fussy.)
UPDATE: October 2016
The Baird NSW Government has changed its mind and decided not to ban this cruel and outdated ‘sport’. Weak and very sad.
Death to all poetry gardens!
In my garden I grow hebetude
just near the wistfulsteria.
The nodding fields of dilligafs
raise two-petal fingers,
yellowed with gorgeous nicotine.
(They hate the word roseate,
beloved of neat poetry gardeners.)
Then the rose ate the budgie,
and westringia strangled the cat.
P.S.Cottier
Looks a tad roseate to me
I’ve become heartily sick of a certain type of Very Nice Poem which moves too easily between description of nature as a mere pretty thing and the poet’s (often fairly tedious) personal reflections. Doesn’t mean I won’t write one again, but I will slap myself with a tulip as I do so.
In June I will be attempting to write a poem a day at another site; more on that soon. I’ll also keep posting at least once a week here. So now I’m off to tend the worm-poem farm, to help with the fervid compostition.
Next week: Less puns.
Tuesday poem: First in a long series of nasty little poems
April 12, 2016
She would surely
free the refugees —
but mostly those
with nice table manners.
P.S. Cottier
Based on overhearing a conversation at a café about how ‘we’ could take in more refugees if only they would ‘assimilate into mainstream society’. I said nothing, but write this in true esprit de l’escalier. It’s almost an aphorism, rather than a poem, isn’t it?
On mistakes
March 31, 2016
So you’ve laboured over a poem, and it’s as near to finished as it will ever be. So you upload it and pay the fee for a comp, and sit back and have a cup of tea (or coffee, or wine, depending on the time).
So you realise that you sent a draft, and that draft was over the line limit. So you refill the form with the proper poem uploaded, and ask if it can be substituted. So you kick your computer and yourself. So you don’t know if the poem will be disqualified. So you may never know!
So you have a glass of wine, and stuff the time. Wine is the only cure for idiocy.
So you are not as celebratory as the woman in the picture.
UPDATE: So on the way down to your favoured wine place, you remember that you are picking up your daughter from school later on, and therefore, that you can’t drink. Let middle class sulking erupt like an erupty thing! (You maintain you are working class, but people tend to laugh when you say that.) So you vent on your blog like a whingey Vesuvius.
UPDATIER: The lovely administrators have accepted the second submitted version of my poem. Drinking in celebration is so much nicer! (Please read with slightly slurred eyes.)
Tuesday poem: Heron’s formula
February 8, 2016
Heron’s formula
A lesson in trigonometry,
the white heron forms triangles
with legs as she inches forward
< obtuse, acute, obtuse >
and reeds write the shape’s third side,
grass and leg linked by my needy eye.
Each retraction from stillness
seems a matter of regret;
a fall from Greek statue
into hungry, stalking GIF.
Silent as a wish, she moves
towards the modest,
root-dwelling fish.
A split triangle
wedged into head axes down,
teaching the dumb water
a critical formula: working an equation
on softer bodies.
Heron swallows, then cries triumph,
and the noise is the croak
of a thirty-a-day frog
krarkkrarking imperfection —
a broken kaleidoscope of notes —
a pocket full of clashing change.
The breath of the eager teacher
who tried to show me the
dubious wonders of triangles,
to draw them on my brain,
swings into memory
with a scalene sharpness.
Sound conjures smell;
ear and nose separated only
by a stretched vinculum of years.
Angel microbes swarmed
in his every exhalation,
armed with gleeful mallets
for playing smell croquet —
sulphur tapped through nostrils —
blunt, yet sharp and jangling.
He could not know that
he was Alice with stink flamingos;
heroic feathers tickling
before, and after, each own goal.
How could I breathe and think
under such an unnumbered cloud?
A limp fish, I soon failed.
The elegance of herons
undercut by noise;
the perfection of mathematics
negated by disgust.
I paddle off, towards firm ground,
away from the sharp, white assassin,
and the chopped pools of recollection.
P.S. Cottier
This poem was just commended in the World Wetlands Day Poetry Prize, judged by Sarah Day, so I thought it would be nice for people to be able to read it. The winning poems are posted at the link, and very good they are too. The site itself is as cool as a rockpool and thrice as pretty.
This is an unusual poem for me in that it combines the natural world and memory and mathematics. I am innumerate, so the maths is the most freaky part. The poem recalls someone being turned off the so-called Queen of the Sciences for life. Sometimes the division between authorial voice and real author is pretty swampy.
Heron’s formula has something clever to do with triangles, I think. Personally, I am satisfied that the sail on the swanboat in the picture above is a most definite triangle. I passed Shapes at kindergarten with flying colours.
Click this link to see which other poets are Tuesdaying.
PS Cottier 