andrew-m-bell
Andrew M. Bell is an award-winning writer of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, plays and screenplays. His work has been published and broadcast in New Zealand, Australia, Israel, England and USA. / / Andrew lives in Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa with his wife and their two sons. Andrew and his family have managed to survive four major earthquakes since September 4, 2010 and, at time of writing, over 8,000 aftershocks. Andrew loves to surf and has done so since he was 15 years old. / / Readers are invited to check out his blog at: / / www.aotearoasunrise.blogspot.com / / Readers can also check out his website at: / / www.biggerthanbenhurproductions.com
Mischief light fills his eyes
and he can’t believe his ears.
His father is giving him permission
to smash a plate on the concrete driveway.
Mum’s picked up a nice line in Crown Lynn retro plates
in a second-hand shop in Timaru
and she’s culling hard.
Tiny chip on the underside of the rim, felt but unseen,
and it’s unsentimentally consigned
to the dustbin of history
or at least some anonymous landfill.
Dad sees an opportunity for secret boy business,
sanctioned vandalism. “Don’t tell Mum. She wouldn’t approve.”
That boy’s blue eyes are
charged with adrenalin
when that white innocence shatters
in a porcelain explosion.
“Do you feel a little bit Greek?” Dad asks
and is met with incomprehension.
Andrew M. Bell
May 15, 2022
May 15, 2022 at 12:54 AM UTC
Radio news bulletin in the car
the last item read in those mellifluous tones
is about a seven-year-old boy
struck and killed by a car
in a poor suburb of Wellington.
The protocol around the legal and privacy issues
means it’s “no name, no pack drill”,
but he was someone,
someone’s son, grandson
perhaps even great-grandson.
He had probably had siblings,
definitely friends and playmates.
Somewhere in a house with
inadequate winter heating,
where the household income is
constantly under siege
and life never rises above a struggle,
there is a mother and a father
who bear this greatest grief.
Andrew M. Bell
May 15, 2022
May 15, 2022 at 12:48 AM UTC
(In memory of Norris Hickey 1935-2014)
Love of family and fly-fishing: twin tributaries flowed
into your heart like a braided river.
Paradoxically, a sociable man who preferred to be alone
on some braided river,
basking in the peace of the wilderness,
hearing only birdsong and the gentle whirr of the fly line,
its nylon whipping to where you hoped the fish would rise.
Patience comes easily in peaceful surroundings,
unlike waiting for the blessing of grandchildren.
Eventually rewarded with five blessings.
You always said what a lucky man you were.
I’m glad your luck held because you would weep to see
your precious braided rivers drying up down here,
****** dry by the farmers’ greed for white gold
and the threatened tarāpunga (Black-billed gulls)
getting their nests crushed by callous four-wheel drives.
It would be enough to make your big, generous heart burst.
© Andrew M. Bell
May 15, 2022
May 15, 2022 at 12:41 AM UTC
This is not you that lies before us,
beloved Aunt, for you live on
in our hearts, our souls, our minds
as the with racquet and a ready smile,
as the doting older sister
with eyes shining like a proud spotlight
on two little girls on a crowded stage,
singled out and made special by your love.
You do not lie here cold and lifeless,
beloved Aunt, for you live on
in the warmth of your laughter
and your bright shining lively dancing eyes
and your girlish peaches-and-cream complexion
and in the memories
of two small nephews
in the endless summer of childhood
conquering the diving tower at Jellicoe Baths
or frolicking at Mission Bay
and you capturing all our shared and happy memories
with your trusty Box Brownie.
Feb 26, 2015
Feb 26, 2015 at 4:00 PM UTC
In my luxury there is shame,
using my thin, Western excuses
to hide from my art.
When I read your story
I heard a trumpet of glory
and a stern rebuke
from a creativity so compelled
that, denied the tools of your craft,
you carved your daily poem in soap
and committed it to memory
before washing your words away.
When the days pass me
with the pen's call unheeded
and my reluctance comes
from seeing the word as a foe
then I'll remember you, Irina,
and how the word set you free
from the darkest confinement.
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 9:01 PM UTC
Forgive me if I seemed brusque at the airport,
these churches to farewell
are not where I choose to worship
and saying goodbye is like sheathing a sword,
the danger is not over until it’s out of sight.
You’re an introspective man, covert with your passion,
but I suspect you were as glad to see us
as we were to see you.
It’s been said that you are a perfect foil
to my extroversion,
we are a sort of Laurel and Hardy of the emotional spectrum.
One of the perils of transience
is the absence of solid friendship
so that we sometimes become
like wings without a body.
Having a friend arrive on our doorstep
is to find something we did not realise
we had lost.
A holidaymaker is as bright in the workaday world
as a mint coin on sunlit concrete
so that our biggest concern
was to polish your days
to the consistency of your previous excitement.
We are rusty entertainers at best.
One of life’s more pleasant surprises
is that we never know how or where
we will forge a friendship.
Friendships forged in the workplace
can be the most enduring
because there is no mandate to like our workmates.
For a few, too short days
you brought back for me all that was good
about my life in Auckland
and I can ask a friend for no greater gift
than to reflect a little sunlight.
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 8:55 PM UTC
It was the type of day Wellington is infamous for:
rain slanting into the pursed and puckered faces
of harried pedestrians
and I, out and about with my secret
that in the tall towers where the wheels
grind slowly
a thing not made of commerce
a growing not spurred by market forces
an investment not subject to whims and crises,
but a spark ignited by two people
laying themselves open to love
and hope and dreams and
schemes sometimes lost sight of,
was fanning the flame,
the head, heart, flesh, bone and wairua
of a life
taking root in my beloved's belly,
a life long longed for
a life
whose existence sweeps before it all petty irritations
and affixes itself on my face
as a big stupid grin
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 7:02 PM UTC
Bipartisanship, whatever
the key nowadays is
cooperative collaboration
I sell the rail
You buy the rail
Let’s call the whole thing off
Centre left centre right
sent her round the bend
Get with the program
Facebook Face Time whatever
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 6:59 PM UTC
I do not remember my father as a demonstrative man,
but, hobbled though he was by a pre-war psyche,
we never doubted the depth of his affection for us.
His love of nature shaped our own perceptions of life
and his love of sport showed us the path of true competition,
that the essence is not to better others but to better oneself.
He transfused the ocean into us so thoroughly
that we will go to our graves with salt on our lips.
At all the painful pinnacles of growing
my father was there like a crampon you know will not fail you.
A towering lighthouse in his hat and dark suit
as he led me through the convent gate on my first day
and gently cut me adrift in the cruel seas of education
where the nuns patrolled the playground like killer whales
in search of seals.
He went ahead to each new town to make things ready for us
when I started boarding school he let me go in confidence
he bailed me out of scrapes with the law,
he was as certain as the mountain of his beloved Taranaki
and as solid as the beams of a whare runanga.
When I returned from overseas
my father and I found a space in our lives
where we could really get to know each other.
Through a winter that sparkled
he led me on odysseys into his soul
through the walkways, forests, rivers and coastline
of the city of his birth
which will, one day, witness his death.
If I were allowed only one memory of my father
it would be this: seaweed expeditions.
The northeast winds blew a bounty for his garden
onto the reefs around Belt Road
and at low tide we descended with our gumboots and sacks
to gather the fleshy harvest with its nitrogen-rich pods.
He had a system.
We heaped the seaweed on a number of high, dry rocks
then bagged from first to Iast to allow time for the seawater
to drain and the burden to be lessened.
I watched him as he moved around and about as deliberately
as a crab,
gathering the morsels,
bending to scoop the necklaces from the sea,
the sun's purple fire in the white, white, white of his hair.
He had seaweed in plenty at home,
it was the experience he craved.
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 6:54 PM UTC
They told him he was an orphan,
to be swept, like so much dirt,
under the Empire’s carpet.
He had further to go than the Israelites
to be delivered into slavery.
The men of God would make an honest man of him.
This was not an attitude of prayer
as he knelt naked outside Brother X’s room.
This was no crucifix
he was made to clasp in the dark.
This was no blessed communion
he was forced to receive on his tongue.
This Judas betrayed him with more than a kiss.
Forty years he has carried his cross,
hoping for a resurrection of the truth.
“Silent night, unholy night,” we all sang
and then,
like God,
we were strangely silent.
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 12:09 AM UTC