Ohoka Poem/s

[1]

in Ohoka i made a temple on the front porch on
a sunday morning. my space. quiet. calm. silent.

i was alone with myself under a blue sky.
i drank coffee and i smoked and reflected on Death

Death which followed me
through every long weary day
and each long sleepless night.

Death lived in the music i played on the stereo
it was Death who had written the words.

[2]

words wait in the dusty corners of the room
words wait ...

I want to know

what if we had not failed/ if we had failed to failed to destroy/if we had not destroyed
words hung out limply/ like washing on the line/ in the falling rain.

[3]

i think you expected me to rise from the ashes but i cannot
you shift the ground - i shift the ground - the ground shakes beneath us.

[4]

your eyes
your eyes
you poured it out for me this last day
when it was too late
when i was running

she was nowhere she was everywhere she frames the view she is the view
she fills the spaces she has filled my mind i see only her it goes unspoken

 [her physical absence holds more space than mere presence did]

[5]

where were you before. where were you when you were needed.
tell me. the earth shifts beneath your feet. shakes. trembles.
your eyes. your tears. your hands. your touch. you tell me!

i never heard you

[6]

straight grey-metalled road slicing through paddocks grassed in gold
dark clouds overhang in bulged-down black-purple-steel grey ominousness
stillness tensioned like coiled wire.          
wired
blue vauxhall carving through/ fast/ driving through/ anywhere/nowhere
nowhere to go. no goals. no future.
i won't speak. I am spaced out. silent. in my head.

where were you before. where were you when you were needed.
NOW you are here NOW when it is too late.
your well-intentioned attempts at atonement do not touch me
i have no ears for you.  
she cannot hear you either.
she is gone.

Ohoka Poem/s was written (and added to, altered and subtracted from) over a period of time between 1999 and 2001. The poem refers to events/thoughts/feelings which occurred when i was living in Ohoka in 1979.

Halswell Quarry: The School Trip

[1]

There was still a ghost at Halswell Quarry. I saw him working there

as the bus drove up. He was loading his truck; we passed him and 
             I felt the tears; but then sixty children drowned him out.

I had five children with me today, we all went hand in sticky hand between

the rocks, stretched out in a line that formed a barricade, myself in the middle, 
                           no ghost could break through.

We walked through paddocks and heard the visions of the future gardens, 
Japanese, Korean, and Canadian forests, a wetland where birds could live, 
       “and a Taniwha”, said Christine, a Chinese child born in NZ, “
                  whose tears will make rain to fill the lake”.

Look up and see his ghost outlined against the rock walls, brown eyes laughing at the joke-

in parallel dimensions we live on- I in wetlands still to form from tormented Taniwha tears,

he in the dry dust quarry of past  dreams never foretold; “reach out your hands to mine...”

                                             but he shakes his head.

              Sixty children line up for two toilets, sixty children line up for one

             drinking fountain,  we all lunch in cool lush grass under shady trees.

[2]

Sixty small six-year-olds sat beneath a blue sky enclosed within tall quarrystone cliffs. 

“I’ve been working here for six years”, said the man. “you would all have been babies 
then, perhaps not born”. Stunned silence follows as all the six-year-olds try to visualise 
a world that existed without them. My twins still in my womb, enclosed in a unique world 

of their own, a physical space without measured time, an alternative dimension of reality, 
not this constructed reality of straight lines and calendars,

but an experience shared, known within their psyches, not memory, a time of being when being is not being, thoughts forming through their senses unformed into language, not words -they not owning and still unowned- the muffled sound of the mother’s heartbeat, her voice is unheard but heard, sound without meaning and meaning irrelevant.

                                      
they are that is all.

[3]

The children came to lunch wilting like spent flowers from far too

long under a hot sun; mouths all munching, quenching their thirst,

now rejuvenated, full of energy they are keen to climb the hill.

The man leads off. “Come quick”, says Christine. “Lets be first, come now”.

“I feel like the pied piper”, jokes the man. “This country smells”,  says the

boy  from Venezuela, avoiding the sheep pats. “I don't like this smell. 
                    We don’t have animals in Venezuela”.

“In Somalia there are dragons”, says Mariama. “It is very hot, hottest at night

and in the morning”. “There are dragons in China”, says Christine, “but don’t

                  worry”, she reassures, “they are all made of paper”.

We pass through the gate and on up the hill, Christine still holds my hand.

The children run up the steep path, waiting at the bends, we are the first to

the first lookout,  peering down at the trail of blue uniformed children, a line

                       of blue ants weaving up the hill behind us.

At the second lookout we view Christchurch through its standard haze, point

out the tall buildings in central Christchurch off centre from here. At the top,

a rocky outcrop perfectly designed for sixty six-year-olds to climb, a gaggle

                          of city children free in an open space

at the top of the hill. 

No school bells ringing out the time, regulating the day.  This “united nations” group of children
unified in their blue uniforms are all laughter, chattering excitedly, now plunging down the rocky hill.         

[4]

Arrive finally at the end of the downward track to spiral dizzily into the past; here is the building 
where they ‘shouted’ for him on his last day, telling the tales of his escapades. I see his ghost inside 
laughing, beer in hand, in his element, eyes sparkling. I was here too, do you remember?                            

If I had known what was to come, would I have fled? The seed of the future already implanted,

             already growing inside. She was there too, if we had known.

[5]

The children are already packed into the bus, my clever group in their right seats proudly waiting 
with a seat saved for me. We discuss the rival merits of ice cream or ice blocks on the way back to town...

                  ...I can still hear his voice, the sound of his laughter ...

 

I am home with my children on the deck eating ice cream, we have had a good day, the world is fine today. We are safe. I will leave the past to the past, the future to the future; we are ‘normal’ for the rest of the day.

                             ... I have abandoned the ghost yet again ...

written 18th November, 1998.

On Guerilla Gardening - Richard Reynolds

'"Let's fight the filth with forks and flowers!"

"On Guerilla Gardening" is an activist's call to arms to all citizens - green-fingered, green thinking or curious - to join the revolution of guerilla gardening: transforming public spaces into oases of colour and life. The enemy: neglect, apathy and the disintegration of community spirit. The arsenal: daring, a packet of seeds and a passionate commitment to social change.

When Richard Reynolds first embarked on guerilla gardening, growing flowers by moonlight outside his tower block, he did so as a lone activist but he became a vocal champion for a growing global movement. Charting the battles fought across thirty different countries and the revolutionary history of this subculture, "On Guerilla Gardening" is an inspirational take on Gardening in the 21st century.' "

So reads the blurb on the back of the book. I found this book, quite recently, in a second hand shop (selling mostly clothes actually but with a couple of small bookshelves) so my copy is a recycled book too. Last January/February when I started walking with a friend, following my knee surgery, we discovered a little garden that had been built around a group of silver birch trees on the edge of a public space and over the course of a couple of weeks we weeded it. We didn't know we were being guerilla gardeners then. The garden looked so much nicer and people noticed and came up to us on the street congratulating us on our efforts which was very nice. Then an elderly man from a nearby house came and told us that his wife used to care for this garden but now she is in residential care, and since then, the garden had gone to weed. Sadly we didn't get our guerilla garden planted before the winter and it will now need weeding again, but I am quite likely to weed and plant it next month because this book has quite inspired me. If I do, I will post a picture of it.

Really the book (and the movement) is aimed at neglected and abandoned spaces in large towns and cities. The gardens mentioned are mostly in public spaces but some are also on private, neglected lots where the owners are clearly absent and uncaring. Not all guerilla gardens last forever, some are torn up by local council workers or perhaps the vacant lot is going to be built on. Some guerilla gardens are just small plots with a few flowers, others become larger community gardens filled with flowers, herbs and vegetables, and help to feed poorer people.

And though it is a completely different kind of project, this book is inspiring me when I think about the Oxford Track about which I posted a picture blog about yesterday. Many of the strategies could be taken on board for this project too.

"On Guerilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries" was first published in 2008 by Bloomsbury.

More information about guerilla gardening can be found on this website http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

White Flakes

[a]

white flakes floating
from skies that glowed                                              falling forever

children playing                                                        laughing merrily
in their first snow

when they were thirsty
they drank the
rainbow coloured water                                                     

1954 Rongelap

then they burned                                                      they were poisoned
then they cried
then they vomited                                                   their hair fell to the ground

                                                                       their fingernails fell from their fingers

[b]

The white men harnessed the powers of the gods
They were the gods, they believed this, playing with their new toys,

god is good and god is love and god will destroy the
Infidels, the Pagans, the Witches, the Jews, the Yellow Peril
and all the little brown children on the islands in the seas

[the disorderly reality of volcanic imagery named god
discreated white christian MAN in the image of HIM]

Lovers and Adulterers of the Volcanic god award themselves
Nobel Peace Prizes as they fast as they leave the world in Pieces

[c]

Leave the mothers in pieces giving birth to jellyfish babies
slipping bonelessly onto the birthing mats

[d]

god is white/ bleached/ American/ good/ he is on our side




Iri Ani (20th October 2001)

*I wrote this a long time ago in response to the narratives of Darlene Keju-Johnson (For the Good of Mankind) & Lynne Eknilang (Learning From Rongelap's Pain) found in de Ishtar, Zohl (ed) (1998) Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation*

Note:  This poem was originally posted (on another site) on the week that a United States representative condescended to attend the 65th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  Let us remember that the United States was the first (and remains the only) country ever to use an atomic weapon in warfare, obliterating Hiroshima (6th August 1945) and instantly killing 70,000 people.  Many thousands more would die later from the effects of radiation poisoning.  Three days later, the port city of Nagasaki was destroyed by a second atom bomb with the ultimate loss of 140,000 lives.  Let us also remember that the United States still holds the worlds biggest arsenal of nuclear weaponry anywhere.

The God of Brooms Has Forsaken Brooms

 What are we to do?
It's not as though the weeping willow,

Seen through the little window
Above the sink, in the wrong light,

Captivated her, her dust
Swept into piles and then abandoned.

Or the wind. Or the long fingers
Of the magician, coins flashing.

No, she was like the rest of us,
At the table, shelling peas

Or reading distractedly, wedged
Between ticks of the clock,

Her soul gnawed to the quick:
She knew that she was needed,

And that if she trundled out the old bike
She had not ridden for years,

Pumped up the tires,
And announced that we had no milk,

She would not be back.
She was no different.

In the corner, her broom leaned
Into its body as all brooms do,

Light and long and elegant and fantastic
And onerous and awful and beyond grace.

Alan Michael Parker.