Tuesday Poem: Heatwave, by Emma Neale

Heatwave

February 2013: New Zealand’s worst drought in 30 years

It’s a hot, find shade like a dog day,
let the child crawl, mewl and nip,
pant in my belly-shadow, back-shadow;
get up, pace, restless for coolness,
stalk the scent of water, hope,
openness, that icy air
that rides a river’s meniscus
and carries the dark-flow of trees …

Along the scrappy riverbank,
its rough, ugly, unhewn rocks,
the hills rear up like something unclear
in an uneasy dream, while Himalayan fuchsia,
kōwhai and beech gasp through
the chloroform rags of old man’s beard,
passion-vine, woodbine.

It seems in this heat haze
as if some colourist, or abstract expressionist
has tried to paint out some difficult concept
in green and green and green
but can’t unbind
from their own ouroborine obsession:

loving too much, loss of self,
greed, lust, the choking, short-term view,
the slow contraction of our end of days
green eats green eats green.

but a cry splashes on the air;
the child’s seen red rata, wild plums,
their pinot-sweet light quivers, wells
bright as freshet-falls.

We scramble up the banks of parched grass,
use a peaked sun-cap for a pail,
climb, stretch and sweat
to pluck plump palmfuls,
until the hill path
tips the small boy down
like a tumble of milk that weeps for itself.

The weeds snare, they clamber and drag,
seem to say Homo inhumanus, Homo insapiens.

We push back up
through tinder-brittle undergrowth
when with a rush of noise as if to say
its name is Nightmare a giant bird
comes to stake its claim.

‘But they’re our plums!’
the three-year-old cries;
‘They’re wild,’ I say, evenly;
‘and we have to share, share the planet
with all the other animals,’
as if not complicit, ashamed, riven
with dear world, how long …
what if … what have we forsaken?

Yet when the boy bravely holds a plum
balanced on his palm like an apple for a horse
and the bird’s wings laugh closer,
even the low river seems to misremember
its own name; in curved sheets of glass
that still spill and spill, it sings Lethe, Lethe,
and under my stubborn skin
wide-mouthed flowers
pistils sweet with survival’s honey
petals bright as poison
crane towards the drought-taut sky:
common-or-garden now,
common-or-garden joy.

-Emma Neale

I recently enjoyed reading Emma Neale's latest book of poems, "Tender Mercies". And the poems in the collection are indeed tender, but also fierce, and beautiful, and harsh, and many other things, all at once. It's not so much that she shows us the beauty in ugliness - a cliched sort of description which doesn't do justice to the poems, for it implies that the beauty and the ugliness, or fierceness, or harshness, are different things, separate from each other. Whereas to me it felt as if the poems showed a wholeness, where the beauty and the tenderness and the fierceness and the harshness were all the same thing, like shot silk where the colours can't be separated from each other.

I'm grateful to Emma for permission to post the above poem from the collection. Tuesday Poem, sadly, is coming to a close, though I may post more poems in the future. Over at the main hub site, there is a celebratory final poem made up of lines from all the participants over the years (including one of mine). The group has taken a lot of work and Mary McCallum and Clare Beynon, along with others, have done a fantastic job coordinating it all over the last five years, but sadly no one has the time now to keep it going. The site will however, stay open, with five years worth of poems to browse at the readers' leisure, along with links to all the participants. It's been a great ride while it lasted.

Now I should post a bio, but it is very late at night, I am in a mad pre-Christmas too many things to do rush, and it has been said better than I can, elsewhere on the internet. So, you will find more about Emma here and here.

Tuesday Poem: An Inward Sun, by Emma Neale

An Inward Sun

A small, pale circle
shimmers on the kitchen bench
darts to the wall,
drops back to the floor
where it pulses
quick with fear and warm life.

The cat tries to pat it and pluck it:
sniffs, perhaps thinks
of the furred, golden heart
of a field mouse; butter-fried yolk;
round of Gouda; scrap of Sunday pancake.

The baby wants to work the trick
it thinks the cat in its catness can't:
tries to pinch the sun spill up
between finger and thumb;
licks at the honey trickle look
as it pools on the back of his hand,
and so grows the belief
that if he could touch his tongue to the sun
it would taste of popsicle melt,
beach grit, hind-milk, skin-salt
and a whiskery, shadowy,
trace element of cat.

copyright Emma Neale 2012

My thanks to Emma and to Otago University Press for permission to post "An Inward Sun" as my Tuesday Poem this week. It is included in Emma's collection The Truth Garden which won the Kathleen Grattan award for poetry in 2011. It was also the first place getter in last year's Poems in the Waiting Room competition. It is not to late to enter this year's contest, which closes at the end of the month. There are some good prizes on offer for poems suitable for inclusion in poetry cards to be distributed to doctor's waiting rooms, rest homes etc, and the entry fees help to fund the printing and distribution of the cards - a very worthwhile cause, in my opinion.

Emma Neale is a poet and prose writer who lives in Dunedin. She has published a number of novels including Night Swimming and The Fosterling, and three collections of poetry: Sleeve Notes,How to Make a Million, Spark and The Truth Garden.She has also won a number of awards and prizes including the Kathleen Grattan award, and is the judge for this year's Poems in the Waiting Room competition.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the main hub site.

Ten Thousand Hours

If you want to get to the top of your game, natural talent won’t be enough. You’ve got to put in the hours – 10,000 of them.

Reading the article linked to above really made me think. I tend to dabble. In fact I think dabbling and procrastinating are two of my big talents. I was heavily into patchwork, then I started writing poetry, then I got side-tracked from both by genealogy (though I still think of myself as a poet) and there have been plenty of other interests along the way.

But I get to the point where I'm not satisfied with the level I'm at, and I think I tend to attribute that more to lack of a major talent than to lack of effort. Ten thousand hours? It's a lot. Especially for someone with a day job, and household responsibilities as well. Ten thousand hours of a forty hour a week job is about two thousand hours a year, or five years. For an hour a day pastime, or an hour a week, it's a lot longer - let's see - an hour a day five days a week would be forty years.

Of course the ten thousand hours figure is for the very top level - Nobel prize winning novelist, Olympic gold medal sportsperson, world renowned concert pianist. It probably takes a lot less than that to get to a fairly decent level of competence, but still a lot more than we allow for in our culture where, too often, we expect to be multi-talented and well-rounded.

Some of us would no doubt be bored if we stuck to one thing. I believe it's a valid choice to diversify, but we have to be realistic about what we might be giving up.

So, I am soberly considering how much I want to be a really competent poet and how much time I might need to put in to achieve it.

*****

Links for today:

Great to see New Zealand poet Emma Neale (who won last year's Takahe poetry competition) featured in Poetry Daily (The last link there is the one to Emma's actual poem)

Following links from other writerly blogs, I came across expat New Zealander Martin Edmond's blog, Luca Antara, and this post on the 99 most frequently used words in An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English. An intriguing list, which one of his commenters promptly rearranged into a sort of a poem. (The words are arranged alphabetically on the blog post, it would be interesting to see them in order of frequency)