Mostly an Earthquake Update

I'd been thinking that I needed something to look forward to - something to do other than going to work and doing house and garden chores at the weekend. So last weekend (8-9 days ago) I had a great time at Joanna's poetry editing masterclass, walking in Hagley Park, and then shopping (although the shopping was a bit frustrating).

The trouble with that is that all the things that have to be done don't go away. And many of them take longer because nothing is in its usual place. The result was that I started the week feeling rather overwhelmed. So this weekend just gone, I went back to pottering round doing chores and errands. (Oh, and the NaPoWriMo plan has gone by the board - much as I am missing the fun, the last thing I need right now is an obligation to write a poem a day. They would probably all be really bad earthquake poems, anyway).

On Saturday I thought I was doing quite well. I actually managed to find some flat sheets packaged separately, not in packs with the fitted ones, so my foot will no longer keep poking through the hole in my sheet. I bought a birthday gift for a family member, and in the process of doing those two errands found a couple of shopping centres which actually had some parking available. In fact the South City centre, which was originally inside the cordon, actually had a nearly empty carpark. Probably because you have to figure out which roads you can take to get to it, and because half the shops there are still closed. But it would be a useful place to go if what you want is in one of the shops that are open.

At the second shopping centre, where I found the sheets and the book, I also walked straight past a bakery and let myself be tempted by a very tasty cinnamon loaf. I went to a garden centre and bought cascading pansies for some hanging basket colour over the winter. I plan to collect rain water for the baskets, we have a total ban on garden watering because of many damaged water pipes. And then I stopped beside the road on the way home to dash into a dairy (local convenience store) for cheap milk, and did something I have never done before - I locked the keys in the car with the engine running! My car beeps at me if I open the door with the keys still in the lock. But it turns out, only if you have turned the engine off. My phone call home was followed by a very long wait beside the car for a rescuer to come with a spare key.

However - the good news is that the boil water notice has been lifted. Since we have been using very little hot water though, I thought there might be some contaminated water still in the hot water tank. So I decided on a very long soak in a hot bath which was both relaxing after the car frustration, and served to flush out the tank. I also put a load on warm wash in the washing machine - I have been doing cold water washes and washing in a basin of water for the last month and a half. I also washed my hair - and forgot to put the conditioner in. So now it is sticking out at rather odd angles. I combed a bit of conditioner through this morning and I am avoiding mirrors until it settles down.

Then - I bucketed the water from the bath out to the garden, because I didn't want to let that much water down the fragile waste water system. I was getting a bit tired of carrying it out the front or back door, so I decided to chuck the last lot out the window of the spa. The spa pool is in a conservatory entered from the bathroom, we haven't used it for a few years as it needs repairs that we haven't got round to.

I opened the door - well, I started to open the door, it opened about an inch before it stuck. It wouldn't open any further, and it wouldn't close again either, it appears that opening it released some pressure and allowed the sides of the door frame to move in. It must have warped in the quake. Well, at least we now know to add it to the list of damage for the insurance inspectors when they come.

So, all in all it was a mixed weekend. Much of the rest of which was spent dozing off in various places. I think I have caught up on some much needed sleep, though.

Back to work today, where things are much more normal than our house - only a few small cracks in the wall linings, and actual flushing toilets. There, my boss and I commiserated over the fact that TV 3 has chosen to show really bad movies on Sunday nights instead of our favourite programmes - The Good Wife, for both of us, and House, for me.

And when I got home, while fetching in a load of nice warm fresh laundry from the line, and planting daffodils, I noticed that our roof didn't have a hole in the edge any more. Our emergency repairs - to make the house weathertight - had been started about two to three weeks ago, and seemingly abandoned. Especially when the workmen came back a week or so later and took away the ladder they had left behind. So it's really good to see it done, even though it is just a small item on the list of all the things that need fixing.

And not so earthquake related - the Tuesday Poets have written a collaborative poem to celebrate the first anniversary of Tuesday Poem - check it out.

Big Tent Poetry: Dead Woman Poems

This week Big Tent Poetry introduced us to Marvin Bell and his Dead Man Poems. Such a specific prompt seemed quite challenging at first, however it was interesting to attempt, although I doubt that my efforts resemble Marvin Bell's too closely. It occurred to me somewhere along the way that there was no reason why my Dead Man shouldn't be a Dead Woman. So she is. I seem to have been writing about birds quite a lot in the last year or two.

1. About the Dead Woman and Birds

The dead woman can hear the birds above her head.
They are scritch scratching in the dirt looking for worms.
The dead woman contemplates the worms, the birds, and the nature of transformation.
Unlike the birds she has no wishbone.
It is too late to wish for anything.
The pole of a scarecrow is embedded in the earth in a neighbouring field.
The birds perch on the scarecrow’s shoulders.
The birds make their nests from the straw that pokes out from the scarecrow’s hat, and from the moss that the dead woman nestles in.
The birds are not afraid of the scarecrow, nor are they afraid of the dead woman.
She is learning the art of lying very still, so as not to frighten the birds.

2. More About the Dead Woman and Birds

See, it’s magic says the dead woman, as she pulls silk handkerchiefs from her pockets, from her sleeves, from under her hat.
The silk handkerchiefs turn into white birds and flutter away.
The dead woman is becoming lighter.
She feels a lifting under the soles of her feet.
She feels a prickling between her shoulder blades where her wings might be.
The dead woman has no boundaries.
She makes small exhalations of air.
She leaves behind her white bones and feels herself rising into the sky like a drift of grey smoke, like the skeins of migrating birds straggling northwards.

*********

More Dead Man poems here
And come back tomorrow for the results of my poetry book draw (if you are quick, you can still ask to be included in the draw for a copy of Flap in which a quarter of the poems come from me)

Big Tent Poetry: Referential

Referential Magazine is an online journal based on an interesting premise - submissions must refer back to a poem they have already published, by taking inspiration from a word or phrase in a poem from the site.

This week's task at Big Tent Poetry was to write a poem based on something found at Referential. My poem is based on the words tibia, fibula and the phrase coins in the sack from Elizabeth Langemak's poem, Self Portrait as Fake Saint with Wheel


The Grave Robbers

He doesn’t have any use for it now,
it’s clear, his soul long since gone
and his silver coin to pay the ferryman
fallen to earth from his clenched grasp.

The last shreds of flesh melted into the earth.
All that we saw a few tufts of hair,
his bleached bones, sightless sockets.
I pushed gold bangles high up my arm,

filled a sack with gold coins,
buckled his sword belt round my waist,
snatched the sword from where it lay
beside his lifeless bones – tibia, fibula

hoisted his plough on my back,
filled a sack with gold coins.
We left as quickly as we came,
in the dark hour of the night

when there were none to observe us,
and the noise we heard was only an owl
calling “Who? who?”, though our hearts
beat faster, and a fox in the shadows

seemed to fix us with its stare,
and our step quickened as we heard a rustle behind us
- only the wind stirring the leaves, we said –
but we stumbled over tree roots

and I fell headlong, dropped my sack,
its mouth open, a coin as round and silver
as the moon splashing into a puddle
and staring up at me, a single accusing eye.

For more referential poems, go here

And I have a give away this week. One copy of our recently published book Flap: The Chook Book 2, written by the Poetry Chooks, a group of whom I am one quarter. If you would like to go in the drawer, please say so in the comments. I'll leave the draw open until Saturday 17th at 6pm New Zealand time - which is somewhere around 6am Sunday GMT

Big Tent Poetry: Enough

Just a single word prompt at Big Tent Poetry this week: enough.
I did a free write and seemingly got nowhere, then as I was going to bed that night this memory popped into my head - someone I knew at university long ago telling me about the coat he wore - his father's. The details are my own embellishments.

The Coat

“It was my father’s coat” says Aldis
and while he tells the story, I see
a figure trekking eastwards across Europe
ahead of the Russian armies. His scuffed boots,
nine days’ growth on his chin, his thick wool coat
almost to the ground, dark against the snow.
It carries all that he has, but it is enough.
It is his safe, his valuables sewn into the lining.
It is his tent, his transport,
his camouflage in dark alleys,
it is his cupboard with its capacious pockets.
It is his blanket and his pillow on his long journey
by foot and by ship to a new land far to the south
to a city where snow is only on distant mountains
and on ti kouka, summer’s blossoming cabbage trees.

Aldis explains his father’s coat and I see his father
and his father’s father before him, looking out through his eyes,
I see the coat that swirls round his ankles
and keeps out the chill Wellington wind,
almost too well, it is so thick.
It is his family album, his education,
his history lesson, his father’s arms about his shoulders,
it is all he has left of his father
and it is enough.

*******

More poems on the subject of "enough" here

Big Tent Poetry

This week's prompt at Big Tent Poetry was a wordle.
The words offered: hung, ash-pit, forklifted, boiler, nib, clunk, hand, awake, resurfaced, passed, cupped, lush.
I let them sit in my mind for a couple of days until I came across this post at one of my favourite science blogs, The Artful Amoeba.

This is the result (I worked in most of the words)

Mastodon

When he hears the clunk of the blade
in soft soil, the bulldozer driver climbs down
to find a massive bone. This soft earth
cupped in a hollow in the mountains
is now revealed as the site of an ancient swamp.
Lush grass bordered its edges.
Animals blundered in, bogged down,
while the peak hung above.
Work now stops. The driver moves to another job,
experts are called in to see
what has resurfaced.
Later, the driver returns
to read the story, written
not with nib on paper,
but in rows of exhibits - ancient grass seeds,
fragment of an iridescent beetle,
wood marked with glyphs by the teeth
of a prehistoric beaver. He passes
rows of bones - sloth, salamander, bison -
to gaze at the huge tusks,
imagines himself at the controls
of such a beast,
all that opposes him
forklifted and tossed lightly
into the air.
He raises a hand in salute.

*****

It's rough, but I'm not too worried about that. Lately, I've started revising old poems from a year or two back. I've discovered the "housework method" of editing is remarkably successful. I read over and think about the poem for about ten minutes or so. Then I leave it alone and go and do housework. (Gardening works too, or a walk, or a long soak in the bathtub if actual work doesn't appeal). Somehow my subconscious keeps on working at the poem and I figure out what needs fixing, and how to fix it. So I'll probably put this one away for a year or so as well, and then come back to it.

To see what others did with these words, go here.

Weekend Poem

Just when you thought it was safe
to put the jars back on the shelf,
the wine in the rack,
the books in the book case,
there is another tremor.

Just when you thought it was safe
to hang the pictures on the wall,
plaster over the cracks,
build castles in the air,
the earth is shaking again.

The city is all falling bricks and blossoms.
You keep a torch by your bed,
water in the cupboard,
stack heavy books along the foot
of the walls, put Blu-Tak under everything,
tie cupboard doors shut.

Your chimney has toppled,
your neighbour's house is off kilter,
your friend's buisness has shut its doors.

And then, just when you thought it was safe
to mope in corners, dress in black,
put on your gloomiest face,
there is music in the park,
the first strawberries of summer,
the generosity of strangers,
sunlight sparkling on fountains
and you drive down the street
past a tree filled with paper butterflies.


*********

I thought it was time I wrote something for Big Tent Poetry, but instead of writing to their prompt I chose something else. I'm not doing the November poem a day challenge but I have been following the blogs of several who are. A few days ago the prompt was Just when you thought it was safe followed the next day by "a stacking poem". I've been resisting writing an earthquake poem - I'm sure we will be inundated by earthquake poetry at all the poetry readings in Christchurch in the next few months - but this prompt seemed made for an earthquake poem. I'm sure this is not the best I have to write on the subject, but it's a start.

The photo at the head of the post is a church I passed yesterday when I took a different route home from work than usual. I shot it through the mesh of the safety fence surrounding the grounds. I was going to photograph the tree full of paper butterflies, but there wasn't any parking nearby. I may manage to do so later in the weekend, if it stops raining.

Truth in Poetry

The other day I was checking out the Poetry Daily site and I came across an opening line that brought me up short:

Discovered in a New Zealand school's basement: a colony of garter snakes

It set me to musing on truth in poetry. I recalled a favourite poem by New Zealand poet Lauris Edmond, The condition. In it, she tells of standing on a bridge with a friend, watching trout, when he tells her that if they go upstream, they suffocate. I heard that this is not in fact true, but when he was told so, she refused to change the poem, because her very dear friend had told her so, and he must be right.

Well, In this case I can't see how the poem can be changed without destroying the poem. And besides, since she refers in the poem to what her friend says, there is no actual untruth in the poem - it is true that that is what she was told. It didn't really spoil my enjoyment of the poem to find that trout can, in fact, safely swim upstream.

But back to the Poetry Daily poem, Ourobouros. What is it that stopped me at the first line? Simply that there are no snakes in New Zealand. No native snakes, and no introduced snakes. Not in the wild, not in zoos, not in pet stores, not brought in for movies. They simply aren't allowed. So there is no way that anyone ever discovered a single garter snake in a New Zealand school's basement, let alone a colony. (Come to think of it, most schools that I know of don't even have basements).

The strange thing is that it seems totally spurious to set the poem in New Zealand. Substitute "New England" for "New Zealand" and the poem seems to work fine, though New England residents may tell me otherwise. I can just imagine that the poet may have heard this anecdote somewhere, and misheard "New Zealand" for "New England" so that's what she wrote when she developed her poem. It is probably a fine poem, but it lost all credibility with me as soon as I read the first line. I don't believe all poems have to be factual, but I do think that there are times when a little fact-checking is necessary.

I'd be interested to hear other opinions: do errors of fact matter in a poem or not?

Big Tent Poetry: A Wordle Prompt

I was sad that Readwritepoem wound up at the end of April. But there are always bloggers to carry on the good work. Among the ventures set up to carry on where Readwritepoem left off is Big Tent Poetry.

I didn't jump right on to the horse to ride bareback round the ring - after writing a poem a day in April, I needed a break. But I love Wordles, and the words given for their third weekly prompt were calling to me, so, a day late, here is my rough draft.

Weaving the Nets

The women sit on the shore knotting their nets.
Each rope is a journey, a cord spun
by their fathers' forefathers,
their mothers' foremothers
as they travelled the world.
The nets are the pattern
that ties us all together
since we were first sapient,
since we came out of Africa.
The men are of water. They came
in their galleys and longboats.
The women are of the earth. Do not think
they were weak, when they were bedded
in a pile of straw, or a forest clearing,
a richly caparisoned horse tethered nearby.
When they fell for the merchant with his rich purse,
the young man with the smooth tongue
who doffed his cap in passing, they were not conquered.
They bend, but they do not crumple
nor capitulate. Their hands are as old and knotted
as the nets they make, while they sing
the fierce song of the generations.
They fondle the ropes, tie another knot.
It is futile to resist the making of the net.
Your dark-skinned sister no glitch in the DNA,
but the proof of an ancient tincture in the blood,
a connection over the waters
and over the centuries.

*****

I think I fitted in all the words, though some may well come out again in the editing.
fondle, purse, crumple, proof, sapient, tincture, pattern, doff, futile, capitulate, glitch, caparison

For more poems using these words, go here