Tuesday poem: Storming teacups
January 16, 2012
Storming Teacups
I sit with friends outside the café, cup in hand, and fix the world’s problems. I am the cappuccino kid, frothing with anger. I am the peppermint tea with honey, busybeeing everywhere.
I start to collect china as others gather books. My coffee cups speak volumes. I have a small expresso cup, decorated with Aboriginal designs. Is this how I visualise Aboriginal issues? A storm in a coffee cup, a far-off cyclone in Darwin? A Town Called Redfern, where blood has stained the concrete, as there isn’t much wattle around? I sip, and cradle the fragile, storming cup, enjoying my bitter short black. My frown replicates the lines on the cup, as does my smile.
I have a larger, more solid cup which boasts a kangaroo and emu rampant, and the words “Commonwealth Parliament”, proud as any bumper sticker. This capacious cup and saucer was Made in England. It says so on the base. This is a cup for Indian tea, a cup for colonial sipping. I wear a long white dress, a hat to shade my skin and I practise swooning. The cup, however well made, seems to be cracking around the sides, and a small cleft runs from the word Made past the emu. Surely my firm cup will not break, my crest shatter? I delicately place the cup back on the saucer, and the fault-line is hidden.
I have an old cup which says “Buy Nicaraguan Coffee”. Now that things have changed again south of the biggest border, which coffee should I buy? Perhaps the one that tastes the best. A favourite cup of mine is the one that states “Freedom for Women: Women for Freedom”. The tea-lady pours her liquid into this cup, but somehow she doesn’t look particularly free. Her tea makes me insatiable, and the phrase “dry as a witch’s tit” is conjured up from the steam, cloyingly.
But who would smash a cup? They are useful. They are decorative. I stroke my china pets, these devices for drawing boundaries between air, liquid and table. My extrovert cups hold in our conversation, delineate the possible from the flowing surge of ideas. We sit, cups in hand, painting new worlds like flowers on porcelain. I put out my little finger to hook the fishy thoughts which fly from the cup, through the air, challenging our demarcations.
*
This work (prose-poem? creative non-fiction?) was written way back in the Old Days of 1993, and published in Blast magazine. This brings back so many memories, not least of one of the friends mentioned in the first paragraph, Lindsay Croft, a young Aboriginal man killed in a car accident in the United States while visiting Native American reservations, about a year after I wrote this piece. This gives the work a far more bitter taste, for me, than it would otherwise have.
For excellent poetry fixes, go to the Tuesday poem site. They’re be everything from expresso to latte, I can assure you.
Tuesday Poem: Watching the tango
January 9, 2012
Watching the tango
Legs cut the air; fleshy scissors open and close
and notes fall like syncopated snow.
There is heat here, and a buttoned coolness too,
as the bandoneon squeezes breeze into noise.
Chests press, heart reading heart,
but the pulse beats down below.
Balanced on an unseen rope,
coiling and uncoiling silken loops
the couple moves time backwards,
suspending gross disbelief on
such questing, yet assured, feet.
P.S. Cottier
This poem won second prize in the inaugural Australian Tango Poetry Competition held in 2009, and was first published in Tango Australis. And no, I can’t dance, let alone tango. I thought it was an appropriate choice for an early Tuesday poem of 2012, as we’re now nearly a couple of weeks away from New Year’s Eve, when anything seemed momentarily possible, before the hang-over, when you woke up and could no longer speak English, let alone the other language you believed yourself to be fluent in last night. (You sometimes means me, you know.) Tango will always remain a foreign language to my two dumb feet, unable to translate themselves into anything so complex.
I recently heard that I won last year’s tango poetry competition, and I may post that poem here some time as well. Too much tango is barely enough.
For many more poems, go to the Tuesday Poem hub, and enjoy yourself immoderately. (It is on official hiatus, so there’ll be no new poem in the middle of the page, but many people are still posting. Check out the side-bar.)
This poem is included in The Cancellation of Clouds, order details in the first post above.
The poet’s diet
January 7, 2012
Warning: this post contains improper haiku.
mangoes and vodka
occasional longish walks
haiku in no time
This rare excursion into the dubious realm of ‘lifestyle’ is presented with apologies to all haijin (which is not a cocktail). I do know that counting syllables is the devil’s pastime, but sometimes it’s so much fun. Also with apologies to Japan, mangoes and vodka.
that's me sorted...
Poem from a hammock
January 2, 2012
It’s perfect weather, about 30 degrees. I’ve been swimming twice today, and saw dolphins, black cockatoos and Brazilian tourists; all very pretty. Tomorrow a new Test match starts. There’s always a new Test match at this time of year, and then there’s tennis, or should I say Tennis, in Melbourne. This poem relates to the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, and was written as India came out to bat. (I’m a quick poet, so I finished this before their innings was over…)
I know there’s still a world somewhere outside this huge brown hammock of a country, but in the middle of Summer, at the beach, that seems like an unlikely dream. Here’s a lazy sonnet from a currently rather lazy country:
Every Summer
The flat green bird, flecked with white,
squawks all Summer in the corner.
Clarke, Ponting, Hilfenhaus, Warner
versus Dhoni and Dravid (the one to dislike).
There’s a shadow plays just behind this match
for something odd occurred at Bellerive,
concerning Kiwis, still hard to believe.
So in case something else weird should hatch,
there’s a certain anxiety beneath our banter.
India’s chasing two hundred and ninety-two.
(Difficult, but not impossible to do.)
But I think we’ll win now, in a canter.
And when it’s over, and the song is sung,
silence pounds out its ghostly runs.
P.S. Cottier
Seams? I know not seams.
Best wishes to anyone active enough to be surfing the net. I’ll be back in full hardworking poetry-factory mode soon enough. When I extract myself from the comfortable myth of perfection. Happy new year to everyone.
(And after a lot of thought – for they still pop up in Australia in Summer – I can’t mention New Zealand in a light-hearted poem without at least acknowledging the new earthquakes that happened over the holiday period. I read the ugly words like ‘liquefaction’ and have no idea what that would really mean, except that it must be terrifying to be in Christchurch when these tremors/quakes occur.)
Update: I realise now, having visited some news sites, that as I was drafting this entry, another major tremor hit Christchurch. I hope that the damage was minimal.
Unwrapping belief
December 22, 2011
Go for his wings! His wings!
I’ve posted this poem before on this blog, but here it is again as I wanted to have something for Christmas. I would now describe myself as an agnostic, rather than an atheist, as I was when I wrote this poem. I sometimes picture Jesus as a ninja, waiting to leap out on unsuspecting rationalists. (That’s not him above, that’s Jacob with an angel, by Louis Bonnat.)
We’ll see where I am by next Christmas!
First published in ‘The Mozzie’, Queensland.
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
PS Cottier 