Month of Poetry #5: Vashti

Last year, as part of Month of Poetry, I wrote a cycle of poems based on characters from the Narnia books. This year I thought I'd try a cycle on Maligned / Mentioned-In-Passing women of the Bible. First up is Vashti, the first queen of Persian King Ahasuerus in the Book of Esther, who gets herself disgraced and demoted by refusing to answer the king's summons to appear at his banquet for him to show her off to his nobles. I am greatly in sympathy with Vashti; the King sounds like an arse, frankly.

Because I'm keen to practice the form more, I've written it as a Sevenling.

Vashti

Beautiful, I am beautiful, crowned or crownless
With wit enough to please a king, yes,
And merry, with my maidens, when I feast -

Proud, too, nostrils flaring like a blood horse at foolish commands
Not afraid of power or cowed by brutality, no,
And fierce enough to stand against a king, who says come -

Wrapped in my defiance, the trek away was long.

- Kathy, 5/1/15

Month of Poetry #4: Waiting for the poem to arrive

Waiting for the poem to arrive, I go about my business -
dishes, packing, eating blueberries, delivery of children to grandparents
kiss kiss goodbye darling!

a walk by a lake, a decaf coffee with a chocolate spoon
the sun bitier than it looks, settling scarf-like around my shoulders
the air smelling sweetish and a little like ducks

a movie about Alan Turing and the Enigma machine, with its bitter punchline
(apparently, saving 14 million lives isn't enough to save you;
not if you like having sex with people of your own gender)

dinner in a cafe, heated rapid conversation
a wandering journey home, the moon a gold coin full high in the sky
the first fragrant sip of bedtime camomile tea -

oh, look. here it is. it turned up after all.

- Kathy, 4/1/15

2014: The year that was

Month of Poetry is on a challenge day today (which means posting to the locked MoP blog rather than here), so I thought it might be an opportune moment to do the traditional Year in Review post.

2014! What a merry prankster of a year you were. Like all jokers, you weren't nearly as funny as you thought you were, and a lot of the time, you were downright mean. But you had your moments of mirth and lightness, even if I did spent almost all of you on hyper-alert waiting for the next cream pie in the face.


The Good first:

- Holidays. We had a lovely long weekend as a family in Portarlington in March, and the girls and I were lucky enough to get away for 5 days at Easter with friends to Merricks on the Mornington Peninsula. Both of these short breaks were relaxing, recharging and much needed time out of routine.

I also had a week off in January with the kids, which worked very well as a "holiday from home", featuring lots of day trips and mini adventures.

July, of course, brought the long-anticipated 2 weeks in Port Douglas. This was the girls' first-ever plane flight and the first time we have ever holidayed interstate as a family. It was every kind of wonderful; I raved about it at the time and I still think, often and warmly, about the beaches, the Reef and the magical Daintree. Being surrounded by so much beauty was both humbling and energising.


- Activities. Both the big girls got into netball this year, and are really enjoying it. The 11yo and my husband continued their guitar lessons and the improvement both have shown is remarkable. Husband has also taken up distance walking this year, with great results in his overall energy and fitness levels. I had hopes of becoming a distance walker myself, and also of building my writing up, but it didn't happen for me this year. (See: The Bad).

- Food, birthdays, special days and books: Once again, delicious food, fancy cakes, fun birthdays / Easter / Mothers and Fathers Days / Christmas and wonderful books were grace notes in our year. Yum Cha, meals out, home cooking, and increasing culinary experimentation from husband (partly fuelled by his role as Assistant Cook at the school's cooking classes) has meant we've eaten richly this year, and food has been a support and delight through tougher times.


On the book front, I read many amazing texts and reviewed most of them, either on this blog or on The Shake or Global Comment. Book of the Year is hard to pick, but We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, The Burial, Boy Lost and The Swan Book would have to be front-runners.

The kids have also had a bookly year, with their wholehearted embrace of Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and the two big read-aloud series we tackled - Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising and Madeleine L'Engle's Time series.

C, my baby, is starting her reading life now and is greatly interested in picture books. Dr Seuss, Grug, Spot and alphabet books are favourite at the moment, and it's a wonderful to see.

- A good school year: All three kids had a great year at school this year. This was particularly encouraging as it was my littlie's first year at school, and the first year of "senior primary" for my eldest. Both the big girls represented the school in chess tournaments and did very well, and the middle girl also served on the SRC. They are all very settled and happy at the school, which has not always been the case, so that was a
definite highlight of the year.

Of course, along with the Good, there was The Bad...

- Work stress, for me in particular, was a killer this year. My job is a big job, this year vastly exacerbated by difficult structural changes (including mass redundancies) at my workplace. I have found the workload, the expectations and the unrelenting pace incredibly draining this year, especially in light of:

- Health challenges: From early August onwards, I was in a sharp and scary health crisis spiral, which took the form of extreme and unremitting fatigue, whole-body shakes and trembling, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia and parasomnias, dizziness, headaches and loss of appetite / nausea. (Among other things). It took a goodly while to get my current three-part diagnosis and to start to address the root causes, and frankly, the four months from August til the end of November were pretty much hell.

I kept working, parenting and doing the necessary through it all (although, God Bless Sick Leave and Working At Home, both of which were heavily deployed through this phase). The net result, though, is that one of the underlying conditions responsible is going to be with me awhile, and has necessitated a radical rethink of how I do life, and especially how I do work / life balance. I hope for better things from 2015 on this front.

My ideas about 2015, in the light of 2014, are fairly general, and I explained here what I think my core focus needs to be. We have a nice local family holiday (to Phillip Island) coming up, but no fixed ideas about where, or when, any further breaks might occur. I have a determination to get to either - or, ambitiously, both - the Emerging Writers Festival and Continuum in 2015. We are toying with taking the kids to one of the Melbourne comicon festivals (probably SuperNova), as they are old enough now to enjoy it. We may proceed with our kitchen renovation this year, money permitting. I'd like to do, and publish, more writing, both columns / articles and hopefully poetry or fiction. (January's Month of Poetry is the first part of this goal). I'd also like to get back in to volunteering, but I'm going to hang back on that until my health is more stable.

All in all, though, 2014 was a monster of a year, vibrant, full-on, sometimes joyful, sometimes awful, red in tooth and claw. I'm hoping for more serenity from 2015, or at least to be able to rein in the excesses of the past 12 months in ways that promote sustainability in my life.

Month of Poetry #2: The Grandmother

Before I knew her, she had a sharp beak of a nose
A surgeon sculpted her a delicate-bridged replacement, a gift
from her husband, the doctor, her reward for the throes
of childbirth that delivered him three sons; prior, of course, to the rift

that divided them, bitter and permanent. An obstreperous pair;
Ill-fitted fiercenesses, misaligned goals.
He with his certitudes, she with her care
For how things would look. Together, wrecked on the shoals

of redoubled recalcitrance. A rock and hard place,

so he left and she stayed, a middle-aged child
to care for her own ageing father, with unwonted grace
(he, of course, she loved, with the innocent, mild

uncomplex love of the four-year she was
when he handed her over to his own parents to rear).
 For her own four children, love was more difficult; because
I suppose, it was tangled with equal parts longing and fear

What was she like? She was fierce, sometimes kind
Sharp-tongued and savage and did not compromise;
She was brilliant at Scrabble, her quick fluid mind
Leeched away at the end by that dismal surprise

Of Alzheimer's. Yes, I know all you saw of her
was an old lady, bedbound, confused, frail as the grass

I knew her, earlier, when all neural pathways were
still connected. As she made her earth pass

She was who she was. She stood for the weak -
well, for some of them. And she had her hair done
every Saturday, at the hairdresser's, into a soft peak
She cooked me pho and introduced me to the fun

of poker, Monkey Magic, and Brighton Beach in the spring.

She loved me. I think. She didn't say so, but
she called to me, soft voiced, to come hear the birds sing
I wish now I had thought to embrace her then, she with her shut

heart, that bore several wounds too many for one
lifetime. I think I would have tried to love her more
had I understood, then, that sometimes the sun
might be weakly and faltering, edged round the door

but still it shines. My grandmother, you say? She was like me
as I might have been, had I had her road to walk
She was bright, she was curt, she wanted to see the world free
She could be wonderful, she knew how to talk

I loved her. I think so. It feels long ago, now,
Lost in the mists of the Time Before There Was You.
She was everything her time and place would allow-
Her traces I see in the paths the birds flew.

- Kathy, 2/1/15

Month of Poetry #1: A New Year's Day Sevenling

January has arrived, with a cloudy face, but here it is nonetheless ... which means it's time for Month of Poetry again!

Australian writer Kathryn Apel co-ordinates the Month of Poetry challenge each year, in which participants are set the task of writing a poem each day for the 31 days of January. I always find this a very rewarding exercise, and I try to use it as an opportunity to practice different poetic forms, both ones I find more difficult / less natural (eg. sonnet, sestina, rondeau, nonnet, ballads) and my favourite / most natural forms (haiku, villanelle, blank verse, free verse).

I will post my Month of Poetry efforts here, except for the 5 Saurdays in January when I will be posting them to the closed Month of Poetry blog (Saturdays are challenge days!) If I accidentally make something beautiful, I might withhold it too for further work towards submission elsewhere. Most of them will end up here, however.

Today, to kick off, and to host my traditional New Year's Day poem, I've made a sevenling. Wikipedia defines this form thusly:

Lines one to three should contain three connected or contrasting statements, or a list of three details, names or possibilities. This can take up all of the three lines or be contained anywhere within them.
Lines four to six should similarly have three elements (statements, details, names, or possibilities) connected directly or indirectly or not at all.
The seventh line should act as a narrative summary or punchline or an unusual juxtaposition.
While there are no set metrical rules, because of its form, some rhythm, meter and/or rhyme is desirable. The visual structure of the form is two stanzas of three lines, with a solitary seventh line last line.
Sevenling should be mysterious, offbeat or disturbing, giving a feeling that only part of the story is being told.

A New Year's Day Sevenling

Three things breathe colour into this New Year -
Shelled peas, fresh and tiny; the sharp smell of vinegar
A half-ripe lemon from the careworn tree.

Meanwhile, the world grows hotter
Refuge-seekers are denied, and above it all
the one percent sit, ascendant.

our posits of survivability variable, between citrus and armies.

- Kathy, 1/1/15