Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Afterlife Airlines.
I’m your pilot, Captain Meta Physics.
Please fasten your sleep belts
as we are about to leave the body.
Please direct your attention to your stewardess
while she demonstrates safety procedures.

In the event of a drastic reduction in karma,
a mask will fall down from above you.
Place it on and breathe deeply of pure love.
Should those passengers who are clinically dead
find themselves returned by a surgeon’s skill,
the life raft under your seat will inflate
with a new sense of purpose.

After take off the stewardesses will serve milk and honey.
For your entertainment, the movie is
anything with Shirley Maclaine in it
or there are seven channels of chi
on the chakra-phones being dispensed soon.
For those contemplating joining the Tantric Mile High club,
please be considerate of your fellow passengers.

We’re making good time because
the breath of God is always behind us.
Below us to the right is the Ocean of Ego
and to our left some passengers may glimpse
the chain of islands: Faith, Hope and Charity.

We’ve been advised that it’s a little busy on The Other Side
so we’ve been placed in a holding pattern
on the astral plane.
Passengers are reminded to retrieve all emotional baggage
for security reasons
and please help Customs
by declaring all religious preferences.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re cleared for landing now.
On behalf of the crew, I hope you enjoyed
your transdimensional flight with Afterlife Airlines
and we hope to see you aboard again soon.
Please fasten your sleep belts,
we’re coming in for reincarnation.

1.                                                                        
A flower opens in the dawn.

Drink the dew,
dispel the night,
feel the warming of a new light.
We go under different names,
but only one sun warms us.
The rainbow is but the refraction
of pure white light.

2.
You are awash in me,
that singing sea
that gives me beauty without artifice,
forgiveness without guilt
and love without qualification.

3.
One day
while beachcombing
I will come upon a magnificent conch
and putting it to my ear
I will hear your voice
calling me through the honey of history.
Then an urge will seize me
and putting the conch to my lips
I will sound a single sad note
to carry the stream of my tears
across the ocean.

I see you at my door,
huddled against the night
in your Kermit-green jacket
and purple pants
like a refugee from a rainbow.
Patiently waiting
for my enfolding arms,
to spirit you upstairs
for flannelette passion
which makes us feel safer
than the safest ***.

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.

Once I looked to the Bard for words profound;
ageless, his wisdom ran unabated.
Yet Hamlet is now ideologically unsound,
“the slings and arrows” historically Iocated.
I wept for the creature of Frankenstein,
spurned by his master, forced to roam the Earth.
But I’d been subjectively positioned in a paradigm
by Mary’s anxiety about childbirth.
I read Balzac, Hardy and Henry James
describing “worlds” which seemed quite sensible.
Now Eagleton’s exposed their bourgeois games
I find them morally reprehensible.
I dreamt of being Robinson Crusoe
or proud, fierce Hawkeye in his buckskins dressed,
but Fenimore and Defoe have to go,
they’re culturally encoded and empirically obsessed.
Inspired by Guinness, did James Joyce sit down
to see what magic flowed when he was ******?
The stream of Ulysses floats Bloom-about-town
dreamthinkingnever : “I’mamodernist”.

I’d gladly give Woolf a Room of Her Own
and be one of the boys with Hemingway,
but sensitive guys leave their bulls alone
say de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray.
No more fun with Wordsworth being daffodilly,
no simple pleasure reading Mickey Mouse;
Steamboat Willie can’t help but look silly
dissected by Foucault and Levi-Strauss.
The Bible shows intertextuality
says the two Jacques, Lacan and Derrida.
Judas, a construct of bisexuality?
The **** fixations of Herod are?

It’s got so bad I deconstruct a holiday brochure.
I can’t even **** without Roland Barthes and Ferdinand de Saussure.

“Ethnic cleansing” is an hygienic phrase
Which could have rolled off Joseph Goebbels' tongue.
That Balkan soil from which the Great War sprung
Still yields the crop of hatred neighbours raise.
A Pole who twists the ******* in praise
Swept Hani from the Boksburg social rung
And still the scent of frangipani hung
And clung like power while the townships blaze.

Was Nietzsche right when he said God was dead?
Now whose redemption song can Marley sing?
Why won't we see the hater suffers too?
“Love” was the word Christ-Buddha-Allah said.
Love fuelled the dream of Martin Luther King.
God, forgive them, they know well what they do.

Father, you are the blueprint of my soul,
And though I sense our parting drawing near,
The crucible of death will make us whole.

The day or hour is not ours to control
Yet even strangers read your passing here.
Father, you are the blueprint of my soul.

In paradise's fields I see a knoll
Where, shucked of flesh, we sport without a care,
The crucible of death will make us whole.

As age and weight make diamond from the coal,
So I am fashioned from your smile and tear,
Father, you are the blueprint of my soul.

I will not dread the shedding of my role,
A promise waits beyond the footlights' glare,
The crucible of death will make us whole.

So, father, do not fear to pay the toll,
I am the sun, your shadow I revere.
Father, you are the blueprint of my soul.
The crucible of death will make us whole.

(For Marg and Laurice, snake charmers extraordinaire)
  
Like the Burmese priestess
kissing the cobra
I must never take my eyes off
that steely, staring, coal-black serpent eye
lest the fangs swaying in that unborn smile
strike
in the split-second
that contains my salvation or my undoing.
Lips always poised between heaven and hell,
I advance on the servant of knowledge
hooded with an assumed mastery,
that hood branded with Nature's tattoo:
Omega, the end
and that flickering tongue that reads my body
temperature could cut it cold.
Cold as the smooth-bumpy reptilian snout
upon which I lightly lay
the final kiss.

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

He wanted it to be perfect,
for the words to fit together
like a well-oiled…
scratch that…
he’d heard that some Muslim women
(in Turkey or were they Moors?)
purposely wove a mistake
into their intricate tapestries
because only God is perfect
and they were right of course,
but he felt perfect just now
sitting still, warm
in a buck-fifty’s worth
of sunshine.

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

Walking home alone on Saturday night,
social sounds spilling around me then
fading in my slipstream,
I round the corner of my street and
an image of your face rises
to combat the cold that searches for
the marrow of my bones.
Hope flutters like a wounded bird into
the pale sky of a vision desperate
with longing.

Forgive my physical hunger.
You were right to deny it
because by morning
you had given me
a far greater nourishment.

I took this job down at the Corinth Mint
after my marriage went on the skids,
I was bored at home on the DPB*
and I was sick of those two **** kids.

Jace shot through with this ***** called Glauce,
her name brings to mind an eye disease,
and her old man wants us out of Corinth
even though I got down on my knees.

I feel like the serpent who was Golden Fleeced
when Jason slipped the snake oil past it,
but, since I've been working at the Mint,
I can spot a twenty-four carat *******.

Mading relieves Manute from guard duty.
They share a meagre meal of millet porridge before
Manute returns to the refugee nation of southern Sudan.
The noon sun is a harsh sentence for a parched tongue but
they talk not of coffee or juice-laden fruit and
rice and lentils are mountain memories their stomachs can ill afford.
Instead they curse the clear skies that rain only strafing jets and
pray for their dry-breasted wives on pilgrimage to the aid station
carrying children swollen with the promise of death.
They snarl rumours about al-Bashir’s lapdogs
in Khartoum growing fat on food intended for them.

Jason waits, informed by cell phone of Laurie's imminent arrival.
He orders a wheat beer, its earth tone inviting on a silver tray and
its musky sweetness washing away a morning of phone business.
The noon sun is a warm blessing through the picture window but
they talk not of haloed hills or the light-laden river and
recession and retrenchment are market memories their ulcers can ill afford.
Instead they debate '63 cabernet versus '74 chablis and
moan about their reconstructed wives driving halfway across town
carrying children swollen with the promise of private schooling.
They snarl rumours about Key's cabinet
in Wellington while wolfing crayfish and Steak Diane.

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.

On the train to Haifa
I think about my father
in wartime Palestine,
a different time, a different name
but the same place.

His memories of oranges and beaches
and warm, Mediterranean swimming
are the times he chose to rescue
from the six years when the world
was drowning in its own blood.

The weather is blue and grey
but the sun shines
like my father’s medals
on his blue-grey air force uniform
that entranced me as a child.

As the helicopter gunships prowl over Mount Carmel,
speeding north to Lebanon,
I wonder what times I will choose to rescue
from a land built out of longing,
but paid for in blood.

(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

Have you ever stood,
craning your neck to look up into the canopy
of the ancient kauri, Tane Mahuta,
while peace and birdsong permeate your soul?

Have you ever felt
the crusty spray and the satanic whiff
as the Pohutu geyser shoots aloft
while a dozen languages bubble through te reo?

Have you ever shivered
in the receding darkness,
standing in the china-white sand as you waited
for the first sunrise over Makorori Beach?

Have you ever sat
on the summit of Mt Taranaki
and eaten a well-deserved sandwich
while cows grazed far below on the lush, volcanic-rich pasture?

Have you ever experienced
that mixture of fear and awe
as an orca’s dorsal breached beside your too-fragile kayak
in the shining waters of the Abel Tasman?

Have you ever paused
atop a ski run on Coronet Peak
and reflected on the reflections
of sunlight dancing on snow and water?

Have you ever felt sorry
for tourism chiefs and advertising creatives
trapped in offices in the Auckland CBD
dreaming up “100% Pure” and “Clean and Green”?

The lake is smoothed jade after the rain
and only the commercial flotsam
of a lonely plastic Aqua bottle is adrift
on untrammelled waters.
A butterfly of the kind we usually see pinned and dead
drifts by
like me, enjoying the return of the sun,
“mata hari”, the eye of the sky
shining fiercely like Hanuman
from a leaden countenance.
Boys fool by my verandah view offering
to sell me a girl.
The travellers pass through like capsules,
pausing only to bleed money into outstretched palms.

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.

I wake to sirens in the night
the voice of flight
black on white
a symphony of despair
rising and falling in the still night air
crossing the light
black on white
we stole their children
bred them bled them white
now we have bedlam in the night
read them their right
black on white
school work jail
set up to fail
feeling most alive when the sirens wail in the night
black on white
parents clan tribe totem language all recede
speed fills a need
hotwire ramraid let's give these Wetjalas a fright
wake them screaming from their dreaming
fair exchange              too right
I wake to sirens in the night
black on white

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.

There he is,
between the Siberian Tiger and the Maui's Dolphin,
**** Mobilis Nullius.
She does not own a cellphone.
Text for her is the letters and words
that make up a book.
If he wants to take a picture,
he'll use a camera, thanks.
She doesn't want to download, upload,
freeload, overload,
girl, you've got to carry that load
of debt to the telco company.
He watches movies in the cinema
and he doesn't want to be hooked up
to the internet
or caught in the ever-widening net of commerce.
She's happy with the ancient ways,
songlines on the landline
lines on the land
where a woman can walk away
and hear only the ringing
of bird song,
lines on the land
a man can follow to the heart
of somewhere lost
and know only peace.

It is an ancient Poet
and he stoppeth me.
“Beware of poetry, my son,
She’s a gold digger.
She’ll chew you up and spit you out,
leave you penniless and lying in a gutter,
drunk on absinthe,
while the rich novelists and scriptwriters
step over you, laughing.”

“Hold off! unhand me, greybeard loon!”
Unheeding, I slunk off to my garret
to compose a villanelle,
heavily derivative of Dylan Thomas.
  
I only wanted to get girls,
but before I knew it
I was roaming with the Romantics,
bopping with the Beats
and cruising with the Classicists.
Popping some Pope, shooting some Stevie Smith
or hitting up Heaney,
I was hopelessly addicted.
And I never did get the girl.

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

“Poetry’s for poofters, innit?”
A square jaw
thrustwobbling out of sagging jowls
to menace my airspace.
The first assault,
olfactory.
Saliva hops into my bitter dominion.
Draw breath, draw back
as knuckles whiten
and eyes glaze with a lust
for ****** architecture.
“Excuse me, I think I left my car headlights on.”

You should practise joy more often,
it becomes you
and the radiance in your eyes
when you receive what others take for granted
is, for me, the greatest gift
and the deepest sorrow.
For you should not have to live on the crumbs
and these small kindnesses are your due,
what you deserve
not what you should have to crave.
I cannot understand how one so giving of her love
has received so little in return.
So, like a beautiful antique bureau that has been moved
too many times by careless owners,
your burnished mahogany heart
has been chipped and scarred and
my cargoes of love often find anchor in
a harbour of doubt.
My words may fall short of your hesitant ear but
perhaps your mouth believes my kisses,
your body believes my arms
and in my eyes can you see how your joy
begets my joy?

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.

Child,
wistful child,
within the spiral framed.
Upward into encroaching shadows
where each rung
steals another colour
from the blossom of your days.

“You can never go back,”
someone famous once said
and it’s true.
Wading out from the paddy field, I swim around
to view this piece of the past from the water.
But it has changed. Its name, its appearance.
Fifteen years on
and there is more, more of everything
but less of spirit.
Our memories stay frozen while the world
moves on.
I climb the steep stairs from the lake.
An old woman sits under a Carlsberg umbrella.
I feel foolish, but I have to know.
“Was this once called Christa’s?”
She cackles delightedly through her
betel-ravished gums
and in broken English I think she is
trying to tell me she is Christa.
I walk down the hill
past a stream of local “hello” purveyors,
but they blur behind
the gallery of faces mood-lit in my mind,
people who once meant so much
lost now in time and distance.
You can never go back.
You can only lift the lid of history.

With never a thought for the shadow of corrosion
nor the fertile breeding ground
of eel slime and rabbit guts,
we took adventure’s companion:
the pocket-knife,
and sliced our thumbs.
A fragment of pain
much less than its apprehension;
to watch
the rubyed jewel of life
swell
then run to kiss the earth with salty gravity.
Pressing our thumbs together,
blood into blood,
we made a symbol of our bond.

This was a time
when blood was blood
and not more virulent
than rats in Renaissance Europe.
When “Magic” Johnson was a messiah.
When dentists and doctors probed with impunity.
Before plasma was a Trojan Horse for haemophiliacs.

Now
even the mosquito’s drone assails our mortality
yet we are loath
to shipwreck its cargo of strange blood.
The body once a temple
now a fortress.
But what is to be our vigilance
when the enemy lies within?

Ice arcs through the air
like solid lightning.
The large bolts strike with a rumble
and clatter to rest
where they gleam with bravado
at the dispirited winter sun.
The small bolts explode
with a skittering hiss
and trickle down between the bricks,
prodigal drops returning to the watertable.
Cast out from its plastic host,
the ice bears grooved testimony to their symbiosis,
but this testimony concedes to the crafting thaw
a bevel smoother than a human hand could fashion.
Some ice lies clustered on the brick paving
like terra incognita wrought on a vellum map
by the feverish imagination of an Olde World explorer.
Some lies scattered among the purple and white alyssum
in imitation of a Tyrolean spring.
As a breeze releases
the olfactory history of myriad fridge dwellers,
a cloth rings over a wire tray
in a crude arpeggio which segues into
the basso profundo of the resurrection hum.
The cycle begins anew.

O grandmother,
though we are Pakeha you had great mana.
You lived close to that taciturn volcano, One Tree Hill,
and its scoria scars were like the lines on your face,
etched out by the evolution of that city.
And, grandmother, you remembered the beginning of the cycle
with the lucid vision you could not afford on the recent past.
I always wanted to tell you that I loved you, grandmother,
with a sincerity you would feel long after you passed
through the gates of heaven.
To tell you that when I was a child,
I believed you would be here always,
but then I listened closely to the silence between your words
and I knew you were weary of this world.
You were the last bridge
connecting us with a pioneer century
and I feared we would lose ourselves if ever we lost you,
but we never did
for in our children and in our children’s children
we will see the face of Ruby, the dark-haired girl.

The car horns toll the knell of parting day,
The toxic fumes creep slowly o’er the park,
The traffic homeward plods its weary way,
And leaves the world to joggers and the dark.

Now fades the shimmering lakescape on the sight,
And to the air the dusk its stillness brings,
Save where mosquitoes wheel in droning flight,
Ross River virus loaded in their stings;

Save that from yonder television tower
The besieged magnate to his “mates” complains
The A.B.T. has exercised its power,
Sent him packing without ill-gotten gains.

Beneath those tiled roofs, that mortgaged shade,
Where heaves the serf in many an exhausted heap,
Each of the dole queue mortally afraid,
Whose forefathers once rode upon the sheep.


The wheezy cough of beery-breathing morn,
They swallow Berocca for their straw-filled heads,
The clock’s shrill clarion, or their arguing spawn,
Once more shall rouse them from beloved beds.

For they no more have savings in their banks,
Both busy partners toil to meet their ends;
No children run to lisp their heartfelt thanks,
They clamour for Air Jordans like their friends.

Oft did their annual jaunt to Bali yield,
Their furrows smoothed by oily massage strokes;
How jocund were their Customs trolleys wheeled!
Their cases bowed by extra grog and smokes!

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their media-fed dreams have learned to stray;
The Holy Grail of the Lotto life
Has taken free out of the word Freeway.

All day the sky had been an empty promise
then, crossing the park,
the rain came like a visitation,
the wind rousing the Norfolks
into a frenzy of flagellation.
Then it was gone,
leaving Freo freshwashed
and bathed in a quality of light
usually reserved for heaven.
Under the rail bridge
the river uncoiled through the freezeframed harbour
like an oiled anaconda
and the train skated over the scales of this reptilian mystery.
Out from Leighton, yachts and oil tankers
rode the dolphinslick sea.
A pale yelloworange band
cleaved the sea and sky
as the bluegrey roof of cloud slowly collapsed
under the weight of darkness.
Rottnest was a five o’clock shadow on the horizon.
Surfers bobbed like seals, rising
to ****** the last wave
of polished jade
from the encroaching night.

Man and boy laughing,
their kite dipping on the breeze.
In the silent house,
woman reads Sunday papers,
ear attuned to one car sound.

Midnight-blue swamphen,
first tracks in the dewy grass.
A mist hides the lake,
a spire rising from the mist,
bells tolling, no more silence.

Child cries, hurt in play,
mother comes to console her.
Old woman walks home,
tasting the salt of her tears.
No fire lit for her return.

Girl hangs upside down,
dark hair trailing in the sand.
Gulls dive on ducklings,
dropped from high on hard water,
their blood mingling with the lake.

Thomas, it’s part of life’s strange design
that these fresh days
of your green bud years
will be lost to your conscious memory.
You enjoy each laugh, each bath, each hug, each kiss,
each new discovery of taste or touch
and then it evaporates into past tense.
Amidst the daily demands of the ordinary,
your mother and I
try to cage that steam.

For two weeks prior to your birthday,
we drive around Canterbury, Otago and Southland
connecting the dots of your mother’s heritage.
The sky is big down here, Thomas,
and the stars burn with diamond clarity
in its grape-dark canvas.

When other couples are growing
as pale and familiar as sun-bleached wallpaper
we are growing together.
Our emotions are an expanding business
that exercises new stock options on happiness.
A wire, tubular and fat with lovesongs,
is strung between our hearts
with the excitement of the first telephone
on which we coo our communications,
well aware that we disgust those of a cynical nature.
We fight and pick faults,
but every night we clean the saddle of burrs
and ride out fresh for daybreak horizons,
anxious to be reunited by evening.
We have nothing to hide from each other
and we never speak without listening.
We build a bridge from our dreams
that takes us into the future,
shaping each unique day with the hands of hope.
And still there is
room for romance to be romantic.

In Memory of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)

Liberte¢, egalite¢, fraternite¢ -
you put your courage where your pen was
and poetry bloomed in Flanders Field
alongside the poppies.
With Owen and Sassoon, you rescued
the soldier-poet from antiquity
and wrought from mud and blood
the words that gave the lie to
The War to End All Wars.
You fell just as the race was nearly run
and France wept copiously to lose a favourite son.

Translation - a flawed art,
but perhaps no more flawed
than any art or, indeed,
any science.
Was it Frost that said:
“What is lost in translation is the poetry”?
Any smith learns the limitations of his materials
yet still he pushes them to breaking point.

Translator of the heart,
you took us to the Zone
where the sacred was profane
and the heavenly mundane.
Only the poet dares to look down
as Christ “ascends beyond the aviators”
because the poet knows that
life is a found object
and in any language the greatest gift
is the silence between the words.

Like a sailor returning from a long sea voyage
to find his village wiped out,
like a soldier returning from an unpopular war
to find the gates barred,
his eyes traversed the terrain of his longing,
but the landscape offered him no point of entry.

She no longer keeps the home-fires burning,
she stamps them out
lest they betray the flicker of her ardour.
Across a vast plain of darkness
he sees her there, working in silhouette,
methodically cooling, dousing down their history
from the bottomless bucket of her frozen tears.
Here a memory, there a moment of affection
and over here
every moment she ever arched in ecstasy
or ached with longing at his touch.
“No more, no more,” she whispers, her head bowed
over her *******, “all fire is consumed by ice.”

His ***** and heart debate constantly,
but they are separate animals now and he rises
above them with the lightness of suffering.
Up here, he captures the clarity he was always denied
and he sees her like Venus in a half-shell
attempting vainly to cover her nakedness.
As she recedes from view, she lifts one arm to wave
and her flimsy cloak falls down.

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