Tuesday poem: Limits
October 26, 2021
Limits ‘Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live.’ Pope Francis Four months ago the trees looked like trees drawn in charcoal by a depressed artist — simple strokes of black connecting earth to noon-time grey, throat-choking, skies. Now, watch the festoons of green circling the trunks, as if strewn by the world’s worst exterior decorator. Such vivid newness, almost artificial in its neon promise. And yet, such trees have known blazes many years, lightning-spat, or most carefully set, by those who shaped the land, farmed with fire, forty thousand years or more. We comfort ourselves, forget that this mega-blaze, man-made, was the very opposite of skill. We have changed the seasons, charged the air, dried the possibilities of rain into a parched riverbed of loss. Yes, the trees still push out leaves. Frail canopy above dead mounds of wombat, of lyre-bird-less, song-lost, ground. The reassurance of regeneration this time asks us how many more times green can possibly appear. If next year, and the next, another blaze exceeds all history, will even gumtrees stay gloomed — dead sticks we poked into a lessened land? PS Cottier
Everyone is pleased to see the bush regenerating after a fire, but how many times can it do so after the mega fires that climate change brings?
Poem: The chicken in autumn
October 8, 2021
The chicken in autumn No spring chicken, she fluffs up her hair. Neck is turkeying, becoming its own scarf of bumpy, gobbling skin. She pushes at the strange, frill neck, loose Elizabethan collar, gravity's triumph, and remembers, stroking, the departed flesh of spring. Pink buds looked upwards, as if watching clouds, Her body watered itself, moistly rippled, Holding itself tightly in an embrace assumed to be everlasting, but like any flower wind caressed too hard, and the petals fell. Autumn, they say, is fruitful, mellow, wiser, tasting winter on the air, beyond mere promise of that which can not last, of fairies or of flowers. A graceful pause, equilibrium. But falls of leaves speak of falls of snow, of skin, of flesh, of life. But still leaves may be kicked upwards, fluttering, rudely resurrected out of dignified piles, decorum shed like a lizard's skin, unwanted. Half of life has been spent, but the legs still swing, lovingly, the lungs embrace air. The tough bird sings. PS Cottier
That’s a very old poem, published in my first book, The Glass Violin, in 2008. It’s becoming more relevant every year! You know you’re getting a bit older when you forget the dates that you got various degrees, which is the over-educated version of where did I put my keys? Rereading the poem now, there are more flower images than I’d probably use now, but I quite like it.
Tuesday poem: If I could
September 20, 2021
If I could I would infiltrate this page with seeds, which would sprout as you read down the few lines, and leave you with a bush which you would plant out and wait for the blessings of birds. PS Cottier
Aliens
September 13, 2021
Just had a poem published at Burrow, an on-line journal published by Old Water Rat Publishing, edited by Jillian Hall and Phillip Hall. It’s called The peculiar comfort of aliens, which was my response to the topic, non-human companions. I also put it one about a dog, but unsurprisingly, the submissions would have rained cats and dogs. Do have a look around the poems, it is a great collection.
Speaking of aliens, you can read some great short science fiction stories at AntipodeanSF, where I also have a scifaiku about nasty things that can happen in space. I’ll be having one there every month for a while. This publication, which has been around for a very long time indeed, is edited by Ion Newcombe.
Review: Peter Doherty on the virus
August 29, 2021
I thought that some readers might be interested in a review I wrote of Peter Doherty’s book An Insider’s Plague Year. And just in case I am right, here’s the link! The following illustration has nothing to do with the review, except that mice feature there, too. I just had to use this, so why not now?
My reviewing is picking up a lot after I made my first swag of selections for poetry at The Canberra Times, which took a great deal of thought. The straight ‘no’ is easy, as are the obvious yes poems. It’s the maybes that kill you.
PS Cottier 