TWO YEARS LATER, TUB.

 

It has been a long time, Tub

Since we’ve talked together

We should have done something then, Tub,

for it is happening now over again

There was the nation’s policeman

Who said the world was not so safe

But he backed completely off

When the politicians told him what to say.

And the General of the Army

who agreed with the politicians

Yet a million of us ordinary people,

Believed it to be the other way

WMD have come and gone

This time the intelligence services

with names like DIO and ASIO,

ASIS and Pinocchio

Where nobody knows who told what to who

He has won control in the voting, Tub.

So expect it to get much worse

‘ll be easier now to take people’s jobs

and throw them on the street,

in the name of a god called Growth.

I told you before it was time in jail

For speaking out too loud

Dead still we stopped that one then Tub.

But it will come up again now soon,

And the possibility does really exist,

that I might get it too.

My family too has gone its own ways, too

We told you we were worried then,

And now it is more than two years later,

Two sadder people.

That is the world, Tub

ON A BOAT

            

Boats, magic in themselves

Pushing into the wind

Lee awash, much sail up

A joy rare to experience.

Wandering down the bay

Wings a–gulled,

Every square of sail spread out

Easy for you; a lazy time.

Wind and rain screaming

across the boat. Wet through;

Eyes squinted tight, barely seeing

A little apprehensive.

At a mooring on the bay,

Friends, pleasant times

Sun streaming, sails tied

Other boats around.

Overnight, further up the coast

A strange harbour,

Raining, the hatch leaks,

No sleep; but secure at anchor

The joy of it all,

Out to sea

Fair weather, cloudless sky

Following winds, coming home.

EXPECTATIONS

Expectations placed on me seem all too high

So on us is placed a great and difficult load

And I think at times that they are far too heavy.

But deeply to you they never last

It has been this way over all my years

Asking more of me than I am, can ever be,

Is it my fault ? for I do not always try

Treading a path undemanding but unaware

Is it, has it been, always like this?

It surely has been for me,

Are we those who wander unthinking

Asking little, giving less, from the beginning of time?

Perhaps I try to meet that demand

I think I do, But I follow a path that does not ask,

Nothing. Nor does it create an asking

Rolling; seeking happiness, one or two, never expecting

And your regrets are always there

Readily given; too readily, for they are the deep you

I say it; But they do paper over

any a deepening crack, for I know you mean them .

THE MORE WE SAY

Words, we are told,

are the setting

of ourselves apart. They

are the reason why

we have conquered our distant past.

I have met many people

who talk well.

Some a lot,

Some eloquently.

Some exactly, precisely, knowingly.

But still an inadequate skill.

For in our hearts, inside our souls

the depth of our thoughts,

our lives, our loves, our hopes

are, inexplicable, impenetrable.

If we do not know ourselves

we cannot  understand

why deeply we search….what

our unknown depths

are truly saying.

And if we know not ourselves,

we cannot speak to others.

Nor can we understand

what they have cried out to us

Now and for years past.

Are they empty, wasted cries?

Never to be answered.

Or will the day come,

that day of awakening,

when we will understand?

PRAYER

Pray for the refugees, dad, she told me,

when I told her where I was going just then .

Many with a much greater need, I replied,             

For there is famine, great terror, and talk of war 

Pray for the world, we said, Lord hear my prayer             

But no-one I am sure, was listening

SAMOA

Storm on an island in a black-grey ocean

Rain drumming incessantly on a tin roof,

Drowning conscious thought

The noise of rain and trees conquers all.

Morning at last;

Emerging sun, broken trees,

flooded pathways, leaves

An island, green and awakening, emerging.

An isle of magic beauty,

Set in a blue-blue ocean

The land of Tusitala

The teller of tales

A land of vivid history

A speck on a wide blue ocean,

Traded among the great powers

Over wars set far from its shores,

Its people were traded too

In a history of their own.

Plus explorers and pirates,

Traders and missionaries.

Aggie Grey and Robert Louis

Bully Hayes and the bible society

All have left their mark

On this green and verdant land

All are there, a society of chiefs;

in the churches on Sunday,

on customs so strange,

In this beautiful island in a blue-blue ocean

Where from the edge

You can see tomorrow.

STREET CAFES

I sit in a sidewalk café

(There are not enough in this city)

a busy street – many rush by

within their own worlds

and the worlds of those with them

who share their time.

All different – every one.

Brown, white, faces, bodies

Every one

a person to themselves.

distinct and separate.

We know that now.

I watch them - some rush,

Some laugh, not hurried

I think about them

Some interesting – others not.

The short Chinese woman

wobbling a little

following her husband;

cannot keep up.

A young girl, midriff showing

An older woman - a flower person

of decades long past. Still trying.

Not interesting.

The traffic –noisily struggling.

A truck with a painted sign

for a cause. I try to read,

but it is gone, behind many others.

A woman with a stroller,

That baby will grow

to become a person

different from every other.

A man in a suit

A woman – well dressed

Why is it, that at such a moment, more women than men

still turn my head?

There are many of us.

Is what they see in me,

if they see me at all,

different from

   what I see in them?

We are all distinct.

So must we also think differently

– each one of us?

Is what they think

different  for every one?

Yet they all - we all – are asked to think

this way or the opposite.

black against white

on a hundred different issues.

For it or against it,

With us or against us.

With all-too-few a grey,

Although the world is a thousand thoughts,

and a thousand different colours.

 

THE FIRST TIME

A magic moment it is

And certainly it should be

for all of us.

That first full encounter

With love, and exploration

and new bodies. You would need

to be floating, to tell it all.

They were.

The first story

about the number nine bus

Not that it happened there.

It was the going home after

Top front seat. Both hands,

cupping  a crotch,

quietly singing to itself.

The second was hilarious

on the sands by the estuary

when the tide came in

and the car floated away

at the moment of magic .

And after, he was quite sure

that there had been only half a first time,

Or perhaps only a quarter.

Rozzie’s story was the best , however,

for Rozzie had a broken leg.

In plaster – top to toe,

And they only had the sofa.

The others in the flat,

Were asleep. They hoped.

The time had come,

She knew that. He knew it too.

He had been there,

the day she broke her leg.

Too many fumblings since,

On the sofa, in the car, the park outside.

The both knew it.

Her leg was the only problem.

He propped it this way,

She propped it that

Nothing worked well

But much patience and some care,

and finally an achievement came.

Of a sort.

The last was not fun

In the long undergrowth

prickly and damp

Much time but no patience, no warmth.

She laughs now, but two years went by,

before trying again.

Many years later

they told their stories.

Four of the six. Two

would not tell.

And for none of the four

Was it truly a moment of magic.

But we had grown in the years since

For now we could laugh

at that broken moment of magic.

The first of the many

 that follow us all.

The answer lay in the jigsaw puzzle

What sort of sentence is that

Which sounds like Dutch to you or your cat

But you try to combine

In syllables at least nine

A sentence that rhymes with puzzle

And the one only word is guzzle

As well you have the problem

Along with jigsaw it’ll fog em

THE GERIATRIC CLASSROOMS

[With apologies to Tang Man Lan and others of her age]

Arthritics anonymous they called us

But we are not anonymous at all

For you can hear the creaking joints

At least half a mile away.

It is all a wonderful adventure

For we have showed the world how we are

Men and women, sleeping side by side

With common showers

And unlocked, and unlockable, doors

Mind, it is not all that unsafe,

For the fires of youth are a little dimmed

And if not, the creaking floorboards,

Or the arthritic joints

Give ample warning

of nocturnal adventuring.

There are of course the writers

Who within a week will master the novel,

with plots, openings, endings, short stories,

and several varieties of poetry thrown in.

The landscape painters are the heroes,

For off they go in 30 degree heat

Painting the central plains in washed out browns

And coming back with burnt out reds and pinks

But triumphantly having captured on a canvas

the wonders of our western countryside

The doubtful lot are the sculptors

Women of a wonderful age and presence,

With one of the few men amongst them

Being I hear of not a dissimilar age

taking off his clothes each day.

I cannot help but marvel, that the fingers

and the object that they are modeling

have a hundred years between them.

The unknown quantity are the printmakers

With their lino cuts and printers ink.

It is they we need to investigate

For it seems they started late

And there just maybe a chance,

That it was they who started the rumours

Of the anonymous arthritics at class.

My house.

Some people live in a fish bowl,

Others in glass houses.

I live in a washing machine

Not one that goes round and round

But one that goes up and down,

Somewhat like a yo-yo.