Best Poems Ever

Photographs of Pioneer Women

You can see from their faces

Life was not funny,

The streets, when there were streets,

Tugging at axles,

The settlement ramshackle as a stack of cards.

And where there were no streets, and no houses,

Save their own roof of calico or thatch,

The cows coming morning and afternoon

From the end-of-world swamp,

Udders cemented with mud.

There is nothing to equal pioneering labour

For wrenching a woman out of shape,

Like an old willow, uprooted, thickening.

See their strong arms, their shoulders broadened

By the rhythmical swing of the axe, or humped

Under loads they donkeyed on their backs.

Some of them found time to be photographed,

With bearded husband, and twelve or thirteen children,

Looking shocked, but relentless,

After first starching the frills in their caps.

Ruth Dallas

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Words with pictures

Sonnet from Jimmie Walker Swamp

The declined summer seemed to call for white wine,
then the sun sank and I was lost in time. Night takes
half my hours, lately, and the reading light burns
the page until I am insensible. 

From
Standing Wave
By Robert Allen  

images from here, here and here

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Early Evening

My favourite time of all.

The sun has just set,

sloped down between the hills' dark shoulders;

sky is still luminous with light.

in the no-wind

the trees are still, stopped - 

leaves and branches motionless.

moths and insects flit and

skitter in the dark, 

small blips against the bright/dark sky.

Even-ing out the day, dusk

spreads quiet to lie about the mounds 

of trees and hills, sculpted into dark.

4th November 2010

Alexia

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Why it's so good to visit other blogs...

Yesterday I was reminded of an old poem which I love but haven't thought about for years.  Someone had asked, in a comment about another poem, if the blogger knew the origin of a line of poetry, which she quoted.  The blogger didn't, but I did!
Off I went on a search to find the complete text, and here it is:

Twilight

I was driving the cows and the frogs were soothsaying,
‘Woe, land and water! All, all is lost!’
It was winter full grown and my bones were black in me.
The tussocks were brittling from dew into frost.

The earth looked at me, ears up in a stillness.
I was nine at the time and a coward by fate:
The willow-trees humped into cringing old swaggers,
And the cows lunged up unicorns, passing the gate.

A sudden wind clouted the nose of our chimney,
It rumbled and bellowsed its sparks in a spray;
I took to my heels in the terrible twilight,
For I thought that the sky was blowing away.

Eileen Duggan

Such clever, lovely phrases and word conjunctions; "tussocks were brittling from dew into frost" - isn't that fantastic?

So then I went looking for a photo which would transmit the coldness of those words. This is the best I could find, but the words are better:

What a verb talent! Clouted, bellowsed, lunged....  Masterful!

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Eastern Washington

This poem is from a trip I made from Seattle when I was living in the USA for a year.  Many years ago, now, but the words bring it all back. I was a young woman, shy, a foreigner, married to someone I didn't love. New Zealand, home, happiness - all seemed very far away.

Eastern Washington

Rattlesnake country, they said -
harsh, sterile outlines of land,
and at earliest morning
the heat palpable.

Driving from the coast
we had watched the sun rise,
and caught a white glimpse
of Rainier,
over another mountain's shoulder;
had passed through the Cascades
(high, ragged peaks,
greenness of tree and lake,
fertile, water-lush,)
into this desert, sun-dried place.

We had to carry the boat
the last half-mile
to the tiny, struggling lake;
insects dry-hasped their songs around us,
and I could taste the dryness,
dust in the sun's mouth.

Rattlesnake country, they said.

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Rain by Hone Tuwhare

Rain I can hear you making small holes in the silence rain If I were deaf the pores of my skin would open to you and shut And I should know you by the lick of you if I were blind the something special smell of you when the sun cakes the ground the steady drum-roll sound you make when the wind drops But if I should not hear smell or feel or see you you would still define me disperse me wash over me rain Hone Tuwhare 1922-2008  Hone Tuwhare, one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets, was born in Northland, in the Hokianga, in 1922. At age seventeen Tuwhare went to work at the railway workshops as a boilermaker. He became a fully certified boilermaker and a member of the union, where he was recruited into the Communist party. When the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956, he gave up his membership of that party. Tuwhare wrote his first poem when he heard that his father had died. He was already 42 years old when he published his first book, No Ordinary Sun, in 1964 - the first collection of poetry to ever be published by a Maori poet. The title poem makes clear his feelings about the effects of nuclear testing in the Pacific.  Tuwhare’s work has been called a mixture of working class language, the bible and Maori korero (narratives), ‘as if you are in church and in the pub at the same time.’ In 1999 Hone Tuwhare was named New Zealand's poet laureate.  He was a great poet, a warrior, a taonga. See the obituary published by The Times Miniature book by Dave Wood

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White Heron

Sun-bronzed and
denim-trendy,
the young and beautiful
swirl and settle
around the bar;
they are a flock of high-price birds,
predatory, voracious,
sharp as claws.
Their polished bills
spark and glisten in the light.

They clatter loudly,
and laugh at the edge
of harshness.


(This poem was written after a visit to the White Heron Travelodge in Christchurch, New Zealand. )

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