Tuesday poem: Foul
September 11, 2023
Foul I was warned about suddenly dodgy knees from stopping, ground-anchored with ball, not travelling, rose-red cheeks blooming if I mis-stepped, netball unlike free dancing. But it was my back that wrenched, pain slicing. Score forgotten, I limped and winced, green stomach threatening to disgrace the court. Later, my mother warned Be quiet about it, or we’ll get you a metal brace. The idea of steel encasing me, a permanent cage, a canary caught in inflexible grid, shut me up. I cried at night, tried to hide spasms at school. A broken bone flexing from that ladylike sport? PS Cottier
Netball was the main team sport for girls back when I was at primary and secondary school, which was a few years after that wonderful image held by the State Library in Queensland. I don’t think I actually broke my back playing the game, but I certainly twinged it!
Tuesday poem: Sandpit
May 4, 2023
So I wanted toy cars and trains, but was never given them. No matter, the boy over the road had plenty, and we’d construct paradises of zoom in his sandpit, trucks and cars jostling, even train carriages illicitly removed from inside model tracks. I remember once, sick with German measles, spotty as a Dalmatian, that a book about trains was lent to me, and I read the pictures, fever-driven, transplanted them to the sandpit by pure will, where my friend continued to build roads and water-marked tracks, temporary maps to a place where time stood still, and red vehicles bloomed. PS Cottier
Poem: Eggshell garden
November 10, 2022
Half an egg, hidden in a drawer, a tiny half-skull among the socks. She gathers dirt, careful not to leave a tell-tale trail, fills her tiny cup, waits until dandelions are blown into wishes, wraps a seed in tissue. She puts her garden on the windowsill, a promise behind the curtains, which are printed with pink roses and stringy effusions of lavender. Sprouting towards the light, a tiny green finger pokes into being, and the eventual flower is more dandekitten than anything fierce. It purrs in her mind, her flower wattle-like yellow, punctuating her bedroom with a freedom of glee. PS Cottier
Somewhere there’s a photo of me as a child holding a plant which is growing inside an eggshell. That memory inspired this poem.
Tuesday poem: Glassy eyed
March 21, 2016
Glassy eyed
She wraps herself in air, mere
scent and breeze and rumour,
and perches on the nearest branch
to hear the evening’s chat.
Invisible, except when the youngest child,
not quite doomed to prose,
holds a kaleidoscope to open window,
bored with the inexplicable gush
that parents call a conversation —
a strange animal dressed in beige
that sometimes flares to angry orange.
And amongst the leaves of glassy,
clipped punctuation, caught in a cylinder
of found poetry, the girl sees a pellucid
curve, bending towards the house,
and knows it to be outside the scope
of parental chat or cunning toy.
A shimmering crescent perched
between the eucalyptus leaves,
the eager figure bends towards the hum,
a stingless bee, muted hint of dragonfly.
Shaking her toy and her mousy hair,
the girl turns away, back to the easy
world of solids, and lumpy certainty.
Outside, a quiet sigh augments the wind,
and gossamer wings unfurl to flight.
P.S. Cottier
You can’t have too many fairy poems, in my opinion. Well you probably can, but I quite like this; and it’s nice not to always be writing angry poems about politics or climate change or mass extinctions.
Are fairies an endangered species? Discuss in two thousand words or fewer.
Tuesday poem: My daughter’s words
December 10, 2012
For Zoe
Snow falling in flumps
down to make a slushy mud
as rolled in by
the dalmination of pigs
marketable, beef-eating and
weeweeweewee,
shown on Playschool,
and repeated forever,
one yawning stretching week,
between half past three and four.
(That giraffe-necked word
animation, she connects
with 101 Dalmatians,
a hang-dog Disney book
dredged together from the film
and read once when she was two.)
All hail the child genius, says Mum,
struck with awe, but not quite dumb.
Here, would you like to see a photo?
Every wallet a portrait gallery,
the child nestled beside the notable.
When she’s eighteen,
she’ll deny that
flumps ever passed her lips,
those cubes of whiteness,
borne from experiment,
flavouring my day.
An only child learns fast,
melts into cultured age
and books, the favoured flavour
of literacy.
Her ecstasy at reading now hints
that flumps’ days are numbered.
Expelliarmus, flumps!
She’ll wave her wand of bigger words,
casting new spells.
Not yet, please, not yet.
Bide a little longer,
stay home from school,
and we’ll be two flumps on the couch
between half past three and four.
PS Cottier
My daughter graduated from primary school last week, so I dug out this poem written when she was just starting school, which was published in my first book, The Glass Violin. Now for a list of cliches:
They grow up so fast
Blink and they’ll be gone
No, that’s not your little baby is it?
All so true, and all so tedious. (Note that I am being tough here; back to the safer realm of the satiric after a very rare leap into family matters.)
The Tuesday Poets are of all sorts. Click this feather and track them like endangered birds:
PS Cottier 