Christmas Card in a Poem

I don't do Christmas cards anymore, but for the last decade or so, I've done a Christmas poem instead as my seasonal message to everyone I care about (which includes all of you). 

The last couple of years I wrote English Madrigals, and before that there was a run of a few Sevenlings. This year, I felt that a Terza Rima, with its sound-echo repeating pattern, best suited the times. (Despite the fact that this Italian form is difficult to use in English because of the relative paucity of rhyme words available in a language which has, in comparison with Italian, a more complex phonology. But then, when did I ever like to make things easy for myself?) 

 So with this, please accept my warmest wishes for a day of peace and plenty tomorrow, whether you mark it as Christmas or simply enjoy a day of pause and rest, of cherishing yourselves and each other. 

 Kurt Vonnegut probably said it best: "There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind.” After this difficult year, let us all look for kindness, and give it unstintingly. 

 Lights: Christmas 2020 

 In my hands is a small light, stuttering. 

it is a small light, but is not afraid; 

this hand-cupped star, pale-gold flame fluttering 

 It is a small light, and it does not say 

that every single debt is fully paid 

that all the darkness will be washed away. 

 This hard and hurtful year is now decayed, 

and hearts and hearths call out to bring you home 

all joys grow deeper when they are delayed 

 the festive tableaux set in polychrome, 

the small lights and the bright ones pierce the night 

the year is ebbing, leaving only foam. 

 And with Christmas Day finally in sight 

I wish you all compassion for this end; 

there may be no magic to make things right 

 but there is love, and kindness, here to spend: 

and there are other people; every heart 

carrying its own light; and so we bend 

 all the darkness away; and here, we start 

to put together what was torn apart.

2020 Ahoy

2020, folks. I mean, what can I even say that hasn't been said? It has been pretty damn terrible here in Melbourne, and we haven't had the worst of it by a long shot.

Here is a poem that I wrote a month ago that sums up what I think about this year so far. (It is far from the only poem I've spun from Our Current Troubles - if there is a silver lining to bushfires, a pandemic, loss of work, huge anxiety and fear, and climate change, I *suppose* it's a renewal of creativity).

I hope all is well with you as can be expected in these dark times. Let's all hope for better days to come.

A Madrigal for the Future We Appear to be Having, Whether We Want it or Not

There were those books that said bad things would come;
the stories and the experts on the shows,
dystopias enough for all, God knows.

And year on year on year the louder hum
the skies all speckled with the warning crows;
Too many ways to look for what's to come
the earth is changing now, and how it shows.

New foes arise to beat the battle drum
the tiny enemies in viral clothes,
the musk and mystery inside the rose.

The future's here: we knew it had to come
the world is weary of us, and it shows:
the past is prologue: everybody knows.

Month of Poetry: Emulation Challenge

Today's challenge task in my Month of Poetry group was to write a poem in the style of / emulating a poet whose work you admire.

I toyed with doing an Emily Dickinson piece, but her style is so distant from mine that I felt sure I'd muck it up magnificently. And I wanted to do a 19th or 20th century poet rather than a contemporary - not sure why, but I often write better in more structured forms, so maybe that's it.

I ended up instead writing something in the style of one of the greatest of all twentieth century poets, and in my personal opinion, the greatest Irish poet of the modern era - WB Yeats.

I love most of Yeats' poetry, but my poem today is particularly inspired by one of my absolute favourites: When You Are Old.

As well as keeping the structure and metre of Yeats' poem, I have tried for the wistfulness. Yeats' poem is a to a woman he loved who did not love him back; mine is to the children who will, so soon, be grown and gone.

WHEN YOU ARE GROWN AND GONE

In years to come, when you are grown and gone
Walking the earth in sunshine and in snow
Or flying between worlds; I hope you know
there is one here who you can call upon;

When days are dark, as dark they must become
For every noon the sun-slip shadows fall,
And no human life can all griefs forestall
So when it hurts, or when you just feel numb;

The door is open - so too is my heart
To hold you close, who once I held inside
Love is not proud, yet you are all my pride
My joy, my care, together or apart.

Christmas Card in a Poem

Christmas Day tomorrow, so herewith is my usual greeting of the season.

I hope 25 December is a good day, the best day it can be.

This is what I wish for those who will be doing big family events, and those having a quiet one at home with the teev.

This is what I wish for those for whom Christmas is easy and fun and joyous, and for those for whom it is hard and awful and terribly sad.

This is what I wish for those who don't celebrate Christmas at all, and those who used to, and don't anymore, and those who want to, but can't.

I don't do Christmas cards anymore, but instead I write a Christmas sevenling poem, as my card to you all. Please to accept it as my sincere wish for you all as 2018 draws to its end.

A Christmas Sevenling for 2018

Three colours dominate the season:
Red for the holly we do not grow; green for the pine trees brought to these shores;
white for the snow that never falls on us in the summered south.

Another way to look at it is this:
Red for all the blood of the ages; green for the promise of new things;
white for sadness, and also for purity, and also, hope.

The colours promise: the year, again, dies to be reborn, as shall we all.

A Nonet for Baking at Home

after a day of slings and arrows
needlesticks and playground upsets
at last, sliding through the door:
straight through to the kitchen
to squeeze out the day
in soft butter
rich doughy
sweetness -
home

Two more visual poems

I have been participating in the #poemadayfeb challenge on Instagram this month. I haven't hit every day, and some of them have been rubbishy (par for the course when you are busy with other things and trying to pump out a daily poem!) but here are a couple I don't mind. The prompts were, respectively, Ugly and Sonnet. Ugly is an English Madrigal, while Sonnet is ... a Sonnet :-)

A poem in a picture (Nonet for Water)

A Villanelle for 26 January 2018 (Poem)

I always do a bitter-ish villanelle for 26 January, reflecting on the ills of Australia. I started doing them in around 2012 from memory and I always post them.

You can see previous efforts here:
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017

This year's one is concerned mostly with my conviction that changing the date of Australia Day is the first and minimally decent thing this country could do to stop hiding from the reality that 26 January celebrates the beginning of indigenous dispossession and genocide, rather than anything to be actually proud about.

A Villanelle for 26 January 2018

A nation’s day that celebrates a start
of sorts: the first day of the end;
Blood on the ground, the country’s aching heart.

Denialism is its own dark art
Without owning, nothing here can mend;
A nation’s day that celebrates a start.

And rejection of all others is a part
of the same ill mind that never makes amend
Blood on the ground, the country’s aching heart.

Fireworks and sausages impart
a triumph, sickly-rooted, of whitewash trend;
A nation’s day that celebrates a start.

There might not even be a way to chart
a better way; but at least let’s not pretend.
Blood on the ground, the country’s aching heart.

The truth is stranger, deeper, and more tart
than the fairytales that old white men send.
A nation’s day that celebrates a start,
Blood on the ground, the country’s aching heart.

Month of Poetry #1: A Poem for New Year's Day, 2018

I will definitely not be posting all my Month of Poetry efforts, but I do like to put my New Year's Day poem, so here it is!

A Poem for the New Year, 2018

The new year arrived quietly, while I was almost sleeping;
tucked up against a warm-flush child, her face a mirror of passing dreams
half-smiles and flickering eyelids a semaphore of visions under the skin

The new year: not in coloured skies and disinhibited screaming
but softly, in even breath and the sussuration of trees
between one moment and the next, slipping in under the door

The newborn to replace the dead, as it always does
and the calendar turns over

And we have done this before
and will do this again
and it will, every time, mean both nothing and something:

caught in the human mystery of renewal
the seductive belief in clean pages and blank slates
the mesmerising idea that we, too, can be born fresh

a new self for a new year
forgiven our trespasses, and forgiving those who trespassed against us
here in this year that is granted to us all, every one:
this new-hatched year, with no pain in it yet.

- Kathy, 1/1/18

Untitled Poem

the moon on a hot night:

two-thirds full but I can see the shadow of the rest of it
bright enough to catch the furtive tails of the cats slinking along the wall

not bright enough to drown out the weak city stars
trembling their faint pinpoints against a grey-washed light-polluted sky

weird enough to paint ghosts in a too-soon-summer miasma
bunched-up fists of clouds skittering like air-rats around a knothole

the moon looks down, and forgets:
the world washed in chrome below.

- Kathy, 28/11/17

(This is post #28 in NaBloPoMo. 28 down, 2 to go!)

Questions I Ask Myself At 3am (Poem)

A Madrigal: Questions I Ask Myself At 3am

The one I ask most oftentimes is this:
What is life and living even for?
An existential commonplace to bore.

Sometimes I ask what it is I miss
by refusing all the darkness and its spore;
by closing down the lid on all of this
the fresh pains and the old ones; hearts are for

the opera of knife-blades and a kiss
the beauty and the fury still at war
a storming sea to reach translucent shore.
At 3am I sometimes wonder this:
What is my poet's yearning looking for?
To find truegold, how deep must I learn to bore?

- Kathy, 26/11/17

(This is post #26 in NaBloPoMo. 26 down, oh my goodness only 4 to go that means it is almost December HOLD ME)

Jorōgumo (Poem)

This is a multi-verse haiku with a running foot (ie lines that flow on from each other) that I am working on as a possibility for the poetry book. The story is that of Jorōgumo, a type of Yōkai (monster, ghost, or goblin) from Japanese folklore. Jorōgumo is a woman-spider - she can appear as a beautiful young woman to lure men into her webs, but in fact she is a venomous spider who traps, kills and consumes her prey. She usually lives near water, often a waterfall. In some versions of the story, she appears to be holding an infant, which is actually made of thousands of spider-eggs which then burst open.

I am not especially arachnophobic, but I will not deny that this story is a little shuddery even for me. Sometimes it's good to go to darker places, though. As usual, I am trying to find (or create) another meaning in the story.

Because this might end up in the book, feedback SUPER, SUPER welcome! (The phrase "clever abyss" is a reference to one version of the story where a traveller tricks a Jorōgumo by ensnaring the web tendrils around a tree stump instead of themselves; the Jorōgumo whispers "clever, clever" as the stump is drawn into the water, and this is the source where Kashikobuchi, or "clever abyss", takes its name).

Jorōgumo

the waters fall; clear

and pure above my hidden

snares; my damp, dark nest

a clever abysss

whirls in my jewel-bright eyes;

the stars and the moon

look down, say nothing.

I put on breasts and belly,

costuming for them

baiting my skein-trap

with the scent of their desire

within the forest

in the dark I spin

in twilight i am hunter

in the dawn, legion

my children bursting

life life life to run and dance

a thousand splinters

I am as I am;

I hunt and I eat, and men

fatten my she-blood

their eyes grown wider

as they look upon their death;

all iridescence 

and long-legged, red

in sting and mouth-bite

sticky with longing

the hunger that drives

them into my arms, and I

to sing their dirges soft

and aching-sweet; the

water forgets all that was,

and the web shimmers

caught in the sunlight;

I consume, and create, and

yes am born again.

- Kathy, 25/11/17

(This is post #25 in NaBloPoMo; 25 down, 5 to go!)

Haiku for Sunday (Poem)

heat rises; sticky,
we hunch inside beyond the sun
summer is afoot.

(This is post #19 in NaBloPoMo. 19 down, 11 to go!)

A Sestina for the Ones Who Said (Poem)

This is a sestina based on the found poem idea, but with a twist to make it much harder for myself because - why not!

What I did was go to my six most visited websites (excluding social media and portals for services) and randomly select a line from what was on their front page, to form the first stanza. In order, these are:

The Guardian Australia
Ask A Manager
Captain Awkward
Gimlet Media
Girls Will Be Girls (Literary Journal)
Overland (Literary Journal)

(Yes, I am that boring OK).

So here we go ... I'm calling it A Sestina for the Ones Who Said. It's turned into a thing about the Thing, which I guess is not surprising, given the mood at the moment.

We are not very caring.
How clear are you being when you say no?
Everything is twice as hard and takes twice as long:
We go back to the time our divisions turned into war,
Not for male consumption -
I am still learning how to protect my own consent.

A twisted tangled mess where there should be consent
But to understand the depths of it requires caring:
To truly see a person, not a body for consumption.
To hear the ways in which the multitudinous No
is given: in shout or whisper; semaphore; portents of war.
The act measured in minutes, its shadow dragging long.

It feels this journey has been so long,
and so unfinished, while old men in power debate consent
and what it means. Pitching it like it is a culture war,
like the young, the vulnerable, the women are somehow wrong for caring:
like there is something mutable about the No
like resisting is revolution, an affront to consumption.

And everywhere, it's packaged for consumption:
Sex sells, and with it, the dark ideal of access; for so long
there has been permission to not hear the No.
Do we really own our own consent?
In the broken mirror, we see the shards of caring -
And power and the powerless in uneven war.

Some write polemics about a gender war,
Which is just deflection, packaged neat for angry male consumption.
The contempt that reeks for all that reflects caring:
The paradigm has held up for so long,
Regardless of the threadbare-thin consent,
We did not agree, but no-one heard the No.

The day is coming, when we'll shout the NO
and call out power and the running dogs of war
and start to learn the value of consent.
When the only thing we line up for consumption
is the food and drink we share, as days grow long
and the cruel will become weak, and all power vest in caring.

And although it hurts, we cannot turn from caring:
Power seems so firm, and yet its fall is long;
And hearts rebuild, and love usurps consumption.

- Kathy, 12/11/17

(This is NaBloPoMo post #12. 12 down, 18 to go!)

An Everyday Madrigal (Poem)

My friend's cat's kittens are growing daily on the Internet,
There's a ginger trio, a tortoiseshell and a dark gray;
When things are bad, I like to watch them play.

My kitchen ceiling swarms with spring bugs and I fret:
Are they flying ants or termites? Either way
I look for pictures frantically on the Internet
And read grim pest control sites backlit in gray.

My own cat thinks she's master, not a pet,
She kneads me til I crack and push her away;
She will, no doubt, strategise to make me pay.
I waste time on the Internet -
The sun is bright outside, internal climate gray
The ropes draw tight and I wait out the day.

- Kathy, 9/11/17

(This is post #9 in NaBloPoMo. 9 down, 21 to go!)

Spring Rain (Poem)

all night long it rained
big fat thrumming teardrops on the roof and the ground
like the heart of the sky was breaking
like heaven itself was grieving the wounds of the world
the deep cuts and the little ones

this morning the soil is rich-brown
there are puddles everywhere
the paths are washed clean,
the birds feast on surfacing worms
and droplets, like silvered mirrors, lace the roses

and sadness bears its fruit, as it always does -

from pain, growth.
from tears, beauty.
from grief, life.

- Kathy, 25/10/17

Gift (Poem)

This news story DEMANDED that a poem be created in its honour. I mean, the headline itself! "First-seen neutron star collision creates light, gravitational waves and gold". That's the poetry of the universe right there, isn't it?

The poem is another English Madrigal. "Keep practising until the form collapses in submission" is my motto :-)

GIFT

Two stars in helix, dancing to their death;
Miasma clouds of many kinds of light
The show unfolds, and look! Einstein was right.

Ripples in space-time for half a breath
as precious atoms, formed-unformed, take flight.
Through telescopes, we spy on our own death
writ large in starbursts, etched out in the light.

The sound you hear is breaking shibboleth:
a universe that cuts through all we write.
No earth-bound stories hold us down tonight.
The neutron suns that, somehow, in their death
gave to sentient primates, here, some light:
spoke their cosmic truth, and became right.

The Book Thing

Saturday night bravery, because if I don't say it publicly it's too easy to back out:

I am bringing out a collection of poetry in 2018. It is not titled yet but it is a themed collection of poems about women from key iconic stories - from the Torah, from mythology, and from fairy-tales.
The poems are in a range of styles, from my favourite form (villanelle) to sestinas, pantoums, rondeaus, haiku, madrigals, stream of consciousness, and free verse.

Each poem is accompanied by a prose version of the story of the woman who it is inspired by. Some of the poems are fairly straight retellings of the story; some are reinterpreted or twisted in a range of ways. Sometimes the story is just the jumping-off point for the poem.

I'm self-publishing it and it will be available via a few online book-buying channels and (hopefully) to bricks-and-mortar retailers as well. It'll be a paperback and probably also an e-book. I have a lovely editor and a talented designer lined up to hopefully make it the best book it can be.

I am aiming for a June 2018 launch date and when we get closer to that time, I will put an invitation here for anyone who wants to come along to the party thing, which will include fuds that I make and perhaps a cake if I can talk someone into making one (I'll look forward to seeing all three of you, and my Mum, there! :-P)

This is all quite scary. My imposter syndrome is screaming in my ear constantly, telling me it's all garbage, but stuff it, I'm in my mid-40s - if I don't do this now, it's odds-on I never will. So I thought I would share this plan, to keep me honest and keep me going.

Here is one of the poems that will appear in the book, in case you are interested. This was previously published here and is inspired by the story of Scheherazade - the desperate bride who was the teller of the 1,001 Arabian Nights tales.

A Thousand Nights

Listen, king, and I will tell you a tale.

It starts in a city of saints high in the desert
where the morning light has such a clarity
and the pink hills all around glow with life

and then there is a boat that goes under the sea
nosing up to the shallows like a curious porpoise
inviting you to come beneath, and yet

the sky gallops like a wild mare, ribbons of white foam
chasing each other towards heaven

there is a woman in it, with eyes like muddy stars
a gaggle of geese in a field, and a treasure -
only time will tell what kind

I saw it when I slept, and the song the colours sang
tore my heart into pieces at my feet

Listen, king, and I will weave you a new palace
the filigree of dreams is finer than any lace

honey-golden with promise and the longing,
that aching longing,
that comes when you look to the west
or at the vast night sky, and the soul cries out -

Once upon a time in a land far, far away...

A Madrigal for Roses (Poem)

 My final go for now at an English madrigal - inspired by the inexplicable yet undeniable mood lift I always get, every year, when my roses bloom. 

I grew up with roses - my Dad had beautiful standard rose trees in both our front and back yards and tended them lovingly, and it was my job to water them in the warmer months. I always, always loved them and the way they smelled and the way they felt and the colours and the joyfulness of the exploding buds. 

When we moved into our current home, 13 years ago now, the very first thing I planted was the deep pink rose tree. (My partner's first planting choices, which has been equally successful, were our lemon tree and our front-doorway lavender). I planted in the white and gold roses some years later. I love them all with an irrationally deep love, and this poem sort of picks at why that might be.

A Madrigal for Roses

It must be spring, for now the roses come
Fibrous and silken, deep pink and gold and white:
pink for friends, white for love, and gold-delight.

Dense around, the air is filled with hum
of bees and flash of hunting birds in flight.
Soon enough, the rogue loose tendrils come,
creeping up the wall pale green and white.

A weed so beautiful it makes me dumb;
caught in reverie in lemon light,
life that whispers pleasure in the night.
Old blooms fade but new buds always come
And birth as well as death is dressed in white
And in all heaviness there is, still, delight.

- Kathy, 13/10/17

A Madrigal for My Ageing Body (Poem)

Practicing is the only way to get better at most things, fiendish poetry forms not excepted. Here is my second take at the English madrigal form. 

A Madrigal for My Ageing Body

Everything now sends signals to the end:
loosened muscles, acquiescence of the bone
the mother passing, welcoming the crone.

The lines around the eyes become a friend;
every wound half-healed is there to own.
the time of being young is at an end;
the future sunset written in the bone.

New power comes with it - now one can bend
the light around you, hide in shadows grown.
no-one sees old women; all unknown
you watch, and see, the body make its end
while the birth of suns swims in your bone
and, made of stars, you welcome in the crone.

- Kathy, 8/10/17