Tuesday poem: Pages like football fields
March 19, 2012
Pages like football fields
People try to bring home
what is happening in the Amazon
and they reach for metaphors, like tools.
They hope to find the metaphor
to push reluctant minds into consciousness.
A metaphor as useful as a chainsaw
that fells a thousand-year-old tree.
Some people turn to mother
and speak of the earth’s bosom.
Or of a thick green girdle
(Mother is an unfashionable dame)
of wombs and deep forest fecundity.
When they really work themselves up,
they speak of raping the earth,
which must equate to removing a girdle
In such people’s minds.
Still others take a sporting approach,
calculating the number of football fields
lost to the dozer each minute.
Suggesting that if we only blew a magic whistle,
the infringement would cease, fair play break out.
Such people tackle issues head on,
so long as the goals are clear, and the weather fine,
they’ll take a punt at converting you.
And of course the difficulty is that what happens
Is no metaphor at all, nor a smiling simile.
What is lost, can not be substituted.
It is this process of substitution
which allows some to think money
when they see that thousand year tree.
Just as others call starvation, debt.
These things stand in for each other,
support each other.
That is the problem with minting too many metaphors.
They prop up things that should be brought down.
However, let me present one more.
If this page were the rainforest,
the letters its constituent parts:
jaguar, fungus, creeper, human,
then in ten fleet years (or fewer)
the man who borrowed this book from the library
would have ripped it out, jaggedly.
By doing so, he has caused
all the book to unravel.
Slothfully it started,
leaves dropped daily,
the spine collapsed.
Now it is not a book.
punctuation is gone
pages and w rds have g
P.S. Cottier
From my first poetry book, The Glass Violin.
For further poems, please visit the Tuesday Poem site by clicking the feather:
Sorry to disappoint
March 15, 2012
These are the search terms used by people to access this blog on 15th March (today, as of about 9.30 p.m.):
the cappuccino kid
japan mangoes
clancy of the overflow
tortoises’ picnic
australian beach girls nude
i believe poems
*
That’s almost a poem in itself.
Tuesday poem: Sand
March 12, 2012
Sand
Because it creeps into crevices like tiny crabs,
making a clutching claw of your buttocks,
and because these small private incursions
allow souvenir confetti to sprinkle for days,
as if the tacky beach had followed you home,
an over-friendly guest at the wedding reception
hoping to come on the honeymoon, sticking, and
because, unllke house dust and garden dirt
it seems clean, despite ten million dead things
crunching under your hot splayed feet,
fragmented into this smiling pointilist
carpet, into which you sink, wallowing;
you welcome it. You are the beached seal
on the long yellow towel spread out between
restlessness and mundanity, between sea
chopping, mouthing, swallowing, spitting,
and the inland everyday, shaping you,
trowelling you, like that avid child, eagerly
out-turning a bucket of wet,
inverted,
sand.
P.S. Cottier
The photo is of the place I like best in the world, on the south coast of New South Wales. I’m not going to give the exact location, as I am profoundly selfish. The tiny village there is surrounded by National Park so it can’t be extended. Locals (some of them) don’t want sewage or town water put on, to ensure no more development. You know you’re in the first world where people are campaigning against running water.
Everyone in Canberra treks to the coast whenever they can. Yesterday (Monday) was a public holiday in the ACT for Canberra Day, so nearly everyone left Canberra for the long weekend. Next year is the 100th anniversary of Canberra, so it will be interesting to see if more people stay for the festivities.
Personally, I’ll take the sand every time, and the milder weather. Everyone was still wearing just bathers and thongs, and we’re into Autumn. Kangaroos frolic in backyards. Black cockatoos swirl around, particularly before rain. So. very. nice.
This poem is from my first poetry collection, The Glass Violin. For more poems from a variety of climates, please click on the feather, which I suspect is not that of a black cockatoo:
Tuesday poem: Its’ a beautifull thing
March 5, 2012
Its’ a beautifull
thing to see proper grammar like what beerded Oxford dons’ would write but in the stile of Australia, all sun-bronzed and layed-back and life-savery. I love to see apostrophes’ swimming like little pods’ of dolphins’, near sees’ of expectation points and colons’ semi-twisted like lickety-licorishes’, all hang on; lets’ go and sea. Expectation marks are natures little wake up calls never use one when seven is possible!!! Or three. If you are unsure, its’ a good rule of thumbs’ to use apostrophes’. They pinch the reader, little crabby claws’ at the end of words’ to wake him up. Or her two. Spellings’ important, but apostrophes’ maketh the prose zing; unzip it’s full potenshal almost a Brazilian wax all nice and neat and proprietry like Auntie Sadies’ famous unsean special scones’ with cream.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote this for the ACT Writers Centre magazine ACTWrite, for a special edition on editing and grammar. So successful was my effort that the Centre was approached by a person who teaches editing at the Canberra Insitute of Technology for use in her course as an example of something that really needs editing. Of course I gave permission to use it, with the proviso that students be told that I am in fact literate.
Honestly, I am. Im a Docter of Filosofy.
It is so hard to write that badly. I notice that I still spelt Australia correctly. And grammar. And cream. Sigh.
Now, for properly punctuated poems of awl sorts’, please click on this feather:
Scout troop Australia
March 1, 2012
Kevin Rudd has always annoyed me. The carefully modulated voice that sounds like a school principal circa 1970. The hideous mind-numbingly boring speeches. When he won the election back in ’07 and he gave the most tedious speech possible I knew we were in for a frustrating time. That man can stub out joy like his mouth was a soggy ashtray. (He did do the ‘Sorry’ speech, but that was properly written.)
On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the speech when he was toppled by Gillard, but even that became tedious. I don’t think he’s capable of talking for a short time; a bit like Castro used to be, but I’m sure Kevin would win in any tedious speech contest with Fidel. (In fact he’d probably finish Fidel off through boring him to death, and do what the CIA was unable to accomplish for all those years. Give that man a poisoned cigar!)
I also disliked his giving quick interviews from the steps of church, which seemed to be a very American thing to do. (“Look at me, I’m a Christian.”) If it weren’t for the precarious state of the Labor Party in Parliament, I’d hope he’d resign. But no doubt he’ll be waiting until after the next election to make another move.
And compared to Tony Abbott’s politics, Kevin Rudd is almost palatable.
This poem (or dramatic monologue, perhaps) was written in an attempt to work through how annoying his way of speaking is; the unspoken supposition that seems to be there that we are all idiots. Except for Kev. I make a reference to his visit to a strip club in America in the poem; what annoyed me about that was his assertion that he couldn’t remember because he’d had too much to drink, rather than the thing itself, which is no more than tacky. I also refer to the outcry over Bill Henson’s photographs of a nude thirteen year old girl, works that Rudd referred to as ‘revolting‘. Those photographs are not pornographic, whatever one thinks of Henson.
Scout troop Australia
For Kevin Rudd
Are you listening? Working families sent you here,
children, so work you will. Tie that slip-knot tighter,
and line up straight. There will be no nude kiddies
in my scout troop, girlie. Disgusting, like an unsettling
wind, blowing ideas where they have no right to
be thought. Mandarin may be spoken, so long as that too
bores the listener into a fester of panic, like a band-aid
placed on a scabby ear, and ripped off by millimetres,
forever and forever and forever, each passing day.
Put down that filthy under-taxed fizzy booze, irritating child.
Have you done all of your homework? Wash your hands!
Have we all read sufficiently big briefs? Don’t giggle, naughty
revolting one, I meant paper, not undies, as you certainly know.
We have a visitor. The hirsute fellow nodding in the corner?
That’s God, of course, the fiscally responsible God of Working Families.
He drove a sensible, reasonably priced car to be here with us tonight.
He gives sufficiently incomprehensible thought to regional co-operation.
He puffs out cheeks and purses lips about the environment.
An occasional break-out will be forgiven, by God Over There,
so long as it involves poles and undies so brief as to be mere
commas in a speech about the need for Australian working
families, who are, after all, the setting cement of our society,
and who do fleetingly and regrettably get pissed, and ogle like
Tasmanian owls on cocaine, to be sufficiently supported
by proper and formerly fully funded fiscal policy.
Salute. Wake up, put down that dreadful marijuana and salute.
Who put those undies on the flag-pole? I’m waiting, children.
No-one’s going anywhere until the guilty one confesses,
and writes neatly a hundred thousand times:
I will stay awake and listen; heaven is a decent place,
and beauty is just one short step away from waste.
PS Cottier 