Michele Leggott is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland and was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2008-09. She has published seven books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005, 2006), Journey to Portugal (2007) and Mirabile Dictu (2009). She edited Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland. Michele was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to poetry. See also www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/leggott/index.asp
 

te torea / the oystercatcher

trebling stage left
and how would you ever
pick them out on the rocks
until they move and orange sticks
poke and shrill at the kids who want
food and probably flying lessons
same old same old torea not in
Native Animals of New Zealand
but certainly one of the cards torn
from the jelly crystal packets each week
always three and often duplicates
what were we learning and why is it stuck
in the active grid this morning
looking at Motukorea their island and Motuihe
where a goose jumped out of a boat
on new year’s day and danced
for lettuce from a bucket oh he’s
too little to leave on the farm they said
and rowed back out to the yachts
bobbing off Von Luckner’s bay

dogs rode in the bows of kayaks
landing we supposed on other parts of
the island famous for its permeable approach
to security Pearl chasing down the Moa
out there in the sparkling waters of the gulf
and they got all the way to the Kermadecs
with their charts sextant and radio
and their pantomime imperial flag another story
outside the cordon of plastic ribbons
on the landward beach and a sign
DO NOT DISTURB THIS BIRD gazing
absently out to sea just above
the highwater mark a jelly card swap
an indigene without sound and this book
that comes into the house today
trebling calling catching itself
on the black terraces above the tide
Maungauika and the winter stars rising
over my northeastern shoulder

 

the answers

it looks impossible but really
it happened is happening the table top
bright red and the little chairs
each with a decal on its creamy enamel
the continuous tea party
that seems to be taking place whenever
we look whenever we ask
what was that where are those baths
that merry go round she rides
with one of us the plank and sawhorse
seesaw in the driveway the baby
stomping along in the sunhat
with her mother and the mountain behind
is that her on the path with presents
and why are his fingers bandaged

it is the moving that matters
the two of us and her walking to camera
at Pukeiti the waterwheel beating
along the cool ravine or the Rinso box
and one of us running and jumping
under the clothesline rocking the pram
one taking out the other with the business end
of a hobby horse silent howling
swimming and getting stagily into the car
the circus the fire engine a donkey ride
at Ngamotu Fishers’ bach Dees’ bach
Onaero Urenui Mokau ordinary things
and behind them the extraordinary grief
of watching the toddler on the lawn
fall into her father’s arms

tonight on the cold Wellington streets
I see them walk by coats no longer over
their arms but the ring from Stewart Dawson’s
glinting on her hand there and on mine
and on mine here extraordinary grief
and the answers we make
from distance which is no distance at all

 

te oru / the stingray

hot blue stars at the edge of the world
some like horses some like music
and one has a saxophone
we’ve got chalk words and lots of food
we’ve got the saxophone
blowing us out to the edge of the world
where the poems are

orcas arrive in the harbour
hunting stingray the researchers
who named them have tracked the pod
from the Kaipara and say it is unique
in taking on the rays maybe maybe not
the whales frolic all morning
and when an escaping stingray
soars on camera ray skips lunch
with orca an old story flaps into view
stingray in the boat crew jumping about
trying to gaff it the whacking tail pain
my father’s bandaged fingers
held up to the whirring camera his salute
to the fish to us and to her

hot blue stars at the edge of the world
cool blue bird under the wharf
a new sun climbs into the sky

on this side of the harbour
the tug Wainui and her barge Moehau
are bringing in sand from Pakiri
for the beach at Torpedo Bay
a stingray cruises about the shins
of the kaumatua blessing the sand
the foreshore and the seabed
are not quiet places who can say
what belongs to this green mountain
rearing out of the morning mist

hot blue stars flash of wings
under the wharf kingfisher bird of omen
tell us how the sun lights the new moon
how kites with sting tails float over Orakei
how an old story encircles the gleaming bay

 

  

Sue Lockwood’s poems have appeared in Island, Heat, Antipodes and 14 magazine. In 2003 and 2011 she was a runner-up in The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and in 2007 received a Literature Board grant from the Australia Council. She teaches creative writing in Melbourne and is a member of the writers’ group, Io.

 

 

 

Relocation

for Jennie

I find the bag of bulbs you left
and recall your instructions
to plant them this autumn.

A moon calendar shows
in green wedges
optimum phases,

each of them two,
two and a half days
in earth and water signs.

I’m not sure if bulbs are annual
or perennial, if first or second
quarter is preferable.

My one concern is to get them
into the ground
while the moon is waxing.

When you come home to visit
this winter, some will bloom –
jonquil, hyacinth, daffodil.

Landing now so near to the equator,
I wonder how the moon affects
the sun of your arrival.

 

world view

We are mad with vantage points yet nothing isolates itself
not a parcel under plain wrap, not even meaning.

Take boats in the harbor, masts kissing in the wind,
making and unmaking the sign of the cross.

Single out the brightest boat and no matter how
you fix the scope, nothing you do can make you unsee
the image that rocks in the cove of your eye.

You wish your dreams were Mandelbrots
but all you get is a Multiplex, a squalid night in neon-land
that shunts you into dawn.

Sick of this you slap on boots and trek inland.
The desert has no vantage point, no point of view at all.

You swear you see The Horsehead with a naked eye,
but then the vast silences always were available
when we lay us down.

You meet a man who sets darkness alight
when darkness is all he craves.
Art should serve to remind us, he says.

What’s the after-life, after all, but consciousness lit up
and sent ahead. Gilled creatures live next to him
on the desert floor.

The original ocean is this close, an amniotic fluid holding
the world together.

 

Desh Balasubramaniam was born in Sri Lanka and raised in both the war-torn Northern & Eastern provinces. At the age of thirteen, he fled to New Zealand with his family on a humanitarian asylum. During and upon conclusion of his university education, he spent considerable lengths of time travelling on shoestring budgets through a number of countries, often travelling by hitchhiking and working various jobs. His continuous journeys have further evoked his passion in expressive art and embarked him on the endless quest in search of identity. He is the founding director of Ondru–Rising Movement of Arts & Literature (www.ondru.org). His poetical work has appeared (or are soon to appear) in Overland, Going Down Swinging, the Lumière Reader, Mascara Literary Review, Blackmail Press, QLRS, the Typewriter, Trout, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and various other publications around the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sridala Swami’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Drunken Boat, DesiLit, and Wasafiri; and in anthologies including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008); Not A Muse Anthology (ed. Katie Rogers and Viki Holmes, Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2009) and in First Proof: 4 (India: Penguin Books, 2009). Swami’s first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor (India: Sahitya Akademi, 2007, rp 2008), was short-listed for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008. Swami’s second solo exhibition of photographs, Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg, opened at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, in November 2009.

 

 

Jo Langdon lives in Geelong and is currently completing a PhD (creative thesis plus exegesis) in magical realism at Deakin University. She writes poetry and fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Whitmore Press poetry prize.

 

 

 

I’m reminded of a time my mother

chased garlic down my throat with

spoonfuls of jam & honey,

 

ousting a broken fever, her face

stitched tight with worry

over my penicillin allergy.

 

My Dorothy shoes kicked softly

against the polished doors

of the kitchen cupboard.

 

She’d sat my doll body on the bench

hours before, crimping my yellow hair

for the party we left early.

 

This morning, she relates the details of a dream

in which I fall pregnant with six babies,

my stomach filling out like the moon.

 

As a child I complained she never wore

her wedding dress or rings. It took uncounted

years to see how she wears her love.

 

I accepted it from the spoon, counting

cloves that glowed like white-eyed stars

as she wore worry on her wrists,

 

a bracelet of lines, tense as a watch.

 

 

 

 

The is day still with winter,

the water brown & duckless.

 

Before showing stars

the sky turns

 

blue as the pulse

hidden in your wrist.

 

You drive me home &

the lit vein of highway

 

streams with cars like columns

of iridescent ants.

 

The city fills the windscreen,

moves like an aquarium.

 

Lights like neon fish & somewhere

a little plastic castle.

 

I’ll think of how,

sometimes

 

you wear your heart on your face

like a child.

 

Tonight your reflection fills the windows,

holograms the swimming traffic.

 

We assign an easy currency

for thoughts.

 

You ask for mine &

the ones I’ll give you are,

 

stars curled around Earth

in a seashell spiral of galaxy;

 

a little red planet

floating in my eye,

 

& a pond I want to fill

with coat hanger swans.

 

 

 

 

I watch the rain curl

your hair as we spill into

the black river road.

 

Street lamps & taillights

reflect & shimmer like flares

or tropical fish.

 

In the foyer we

lose beads of water to the

salted star carpet.

 

A constellation

beneath our feet: popcorn &

yellow ticket stubs.

 

We communicate

wordlessly; sideways gestures

in the cinema.

 

Pictures on the screen

fall on our skin, colour us

as we crunch candy.

 

Aidan Coleman teaches English at Cedar College in Adelaide. He is currently completing his second book of poems with the assistance of an Australia Council New Work Grant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tricia Dearborn is an award-winning Sydney poet and short-story writer whose work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Australia, India, the UK, the US and online. Her first collection was Frankenstein’s Bathtub (2001). She was joint winner of the 2008 Poets Union Poetry Prize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Margaret Bradstock has five published books of poetry. The most recent are The Pomelo Tree (which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize), Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). Other prizes include Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson awards. She was Honorary Visiting Fellow at UNSW from 2000-2010, Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University in 2003 and co-editor of Five Bells for the Poets Union from 2001-2010. Margaret has edited 11 books of poetry and prose since 1983, including Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (forthcoming, Phoenix, 2011). Margaret reads with the performance groups Harbour City Poets and DiVerse, and will be reading at the 2011 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

 

The Malley tree

‘without Ern Malley there wouldn’t have been any Ned Kelly
– Sidney Nolan

Malley as bushranger, perhaps,
                        in quilted armour
hijacking poetry,
hoaxing a green landscape.
Verb like bird perches

in the heart of a tree,
the sole Arabian tree,
and lovers stroke the ecstasy
of words
          trembling into metaphors
before the shadowed rocks.

Nouns like windmills
                flagellate the dusk,
water-tanks are armoured
bushrangers storming the horizon,
Darth Vader breathers,
           their blacked-out faces

poets, doomed dreamers, fabrications.

 

Poet without words

“It is incompleteness that haunts us.”
                        – Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire.

Lyric is not a category
but a dimension of pain,
a dog barking to the high notes.

Garbage trucks awake you
                 from pre-dawn nightmare,
long-ago music of garbage-tin lids
mutated through plastic. Three bins,
no music, choose your week carefully,
your cycle of fragmentation.

You dream tidal waves,
                the seas control you
emptying one into another.
Working to balance the board, the words,
             you end up arse-over.
Same wave, same water,
             the wind a perfect north.

Poetry is out there,
news from another front
leaking across the divide,
weeping under doorways,
            glaciers once grinding
their way into the valleys.

On the bald hillside,
stripped vertebrae of a Halifax bomber
like an ark or ribbed galleon,
the bodies interred further down
          under a cairn of stones,
we trade our lives.