Many of you

i
You didn’t come.
Locked away
in your room of dreams,
to heal a body and mind
lost in the wanting
of a man who is no longer there.

ii
It was a party
of some couples
and a couple of hopefuls
An array of humanity…

iii
Your gift, your bone carving
is a thing of much beauty
of some significance and lost hope.
I watch you polish it with pride
your gnarled 50’ish year old hands
holding it away from your
mick jagger eyes, so you can see.
I want to say thank you
for it, the time, your sentiment,
your cooking, but you have left.

iv
It was great to see you all again
Five years of shared intimacy
faded by days of work and parenting
jaded by break ups and death.
Lifted and lightened also though,
life balanced by joy
and the play of our children.
I enjoyed sharing the sauvignan blanc
and there were no after effects from
whitebait fritters tonight.

v
Poets, two of them
accomplished in my eyes
clever.
Shy, how could you be?
You could rule the universe
with your poetry’s
universal rules.
Oh how I wish you would recite.
I imagine you up at the microphone
strong poetry, strong imagery..
(maybe after a strong coffee?)
Wait until my wedding day
you will be asked!

Twilight Time

Will I remember
the sting of your stories,
the whip of your words?

In the miasma
of muddled meanings
I fall asleep
to catch snatches
and echoes

Voices
from the endarkened
cupboards of my mind

Fee

It is great
to hear you talk,
our voices tripping over,
playing chasey
as we chat.
I swore I’d ring you soon
a year ago,
but life ran away with time.

Parenting

I greet you
with arms I wish
were covered
with velvet,
to soften the blows
of a hundred
misfortunes.

When I help
to pick up
the pieces
I hold them gently,
privately acknowledging
the part they
play in making
you strong.

Autumn sun - Haiku

Though it is autumn
sun shines through the cabbage tree
imbuing its warmth.

May Haiku

Under dark storm clouds
The deep emerald sea churns
Passing gulls cry out

Kina

Photo I based my painting on

Marking Time

While it
has been
a gradual week
there have been moments of punctuation.
Question marks around the unknown,
times when the brief pause of a comma was required,
a period of full-stops,
and events of exclamation mark proportions.

Haiku 06

Earth sighs and drinks up
Spent leaves float atop puddles
Sorrows last seasons

Naive Simplicity

Your brother is born
while you sift the incredible
from the yeti and bigfoot
pages on the internet.
You whistle the theme tune
from the X-files, and become
transfixed with the facts
of science fiction.
Your brother is born and
you look for lost marbles,
your eight year old mind
missing the miracle by a mile.

It's a kiwi thing

While the radio talked to itself
about the day’s news
we woke up and made love.
Then in the time it took for our
shadows to do a one-eighty
you had flown away to
the island of snow,
towards the mourning sounds
of mutton birders.

Draining

To save us from drowning
in a cityside pool of sky tears
you don cardboard clothes
caked in the mud of yesterday
to dig a trench around our souls

Ether-reality

Whispers,
ethereal visitations,
your sojourn a frolic of frivolities.
Muse for a moment
on your beneficence, your abilities...
Under some daylight
tree out there you too may turn your
hand to a poem

Emotional Ephemera

It is slippery today
forcing it causes falseness
and failure
Better left to its own devices
devilish vices
devilish voices.
Minds wander to
places best left unvisited.

Yet yesterday
it was sunny side up
running...
outstretched arms
against the mirth
of the southerly wind
on a west coast beach
where the gods were
thrashing about in the water.
Eating mangoes to the
going down of the sun.

Threads

Old habits die hard.
Adjusting to change
I wait three phases of lights
before choosing my green.
Your unmet daughter
is born and starts school.
Visitors must come
in the back door
and leave by the front
so there is no opportunity
to bump into recognised sorrows.
Rommel’s cave was tidier
than I expected.
Window wipers
make small change
of the leaves
on the windscreen.
Light sees its opportunity.
Is that why all the pastry is yellow?

Do you know who you are?

We have not met in two decades
and as synchronicity would have it
we still haven’t.
I imagine what those years
and too many indulgent vices
have rendered.
You were never good at self care.
I remember your bedroom....
sad love poems
bursting out of draws
and your naked pillow
exposing its stains
from the perspiration
of sleepless nights

First Day of School

The five year old climbs
the stile with her mother
and walks across the school field
towards where
the microphone man
talks to the children at lunchtime.
She has heard his electric voice echo
over the fence for months
and looks forward
to seeing his face
with excited anticipation.
Today is her day.

Under her new white shoes
is the moist autumn grass
with the dew of the day
hanging in feathery clutches
amongst the tiny spider web homes.
It is a long way across the field.
She counts 126 spider web homes
before her mind flits to the sky.
She looks at the clouds
with the secret knowledge
that they are the bones
of dead animals, and she
sees the spine of a dinosaur.

Shadows and silhouettes

Face lies on pillow
creases will be imprinted
on cheek for visitors to see
if any would come.

She is more concerned
with opening and closing
her eyes
one at a time
repeatedly
one at a time
and watching how
the long gray shadow
of the doorway moves
up
and down
up
and down
quickly and slowly
depending on
the speed of opening
her eyes
one at a time.

In the flicker
of alternate eye closing
and opening
She can see
the silhouette
of her nose.
Her father would be proud,
She is winking
without moving her mouth.

Ineffability

There
have been
no written words

nor
any words
that speak adequately

of
an emotion
so profoundly whole.

I
search for
non existent words

What
I seek
remains sacred, nameless

Scars on the Heart (for Clarence Moss, aka Papa Steve)

You were a telegram boy, then
a machine gunner in the war
when you saw and did things that
would have left scars on your heart
(and we complain about the weather)

You married your first wife’s sister
you were a father to four boys
two of whom were not yours
you would have had scars on your heart
(and we mither about the traffic)

The telegram boy saw technological changes
in a lifetime that went from
the horse drawn carriage to email
A writer and a dreamer
a gentle loving man,
and no scars were overtly apparent.
Your diary now forms a part of the war exhibition,
“Scars on the Heart”