Ocean

Ocean

‘My dear,’ she wrote, ‘You wouldn’t believe
how the light comes in across the ocean.’

‘Oh yes,’ I replied, ‘I live beside an ocean –
the distant shore, indeed, of the same ocean.’

‘I have kinship with this piece of land,’ she explained,
‘forged in childhood – therefore, too, with the ocean.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said, ‘I grew up on a small island
edged in all directions by one or another ocean.’

‘You could never understand,’ she went on,
‘what it is to be beloved of the ocean.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I expect not. I am merely a supplicant,
offering my respects to this vast, changing ocean.

‘I love to watch its jewel colours shift and interplay,
and the whales further out, travelling their own ocean.

‘I like to walk the winter sand, the tide teasing my feet
with frothy kisses: an enticing, dangerous ocean.

‘Or else to sit high on the cliff while storm clouds
gather and swell and lower, merging with the ocean.

‘I can’t live far inland, on the flat. I need mountains,
a quick river, and a breeze redolent of ocean.’

She said, ‘I understand that yours
is a flat, scrubby country far from the ocean.

‘I have read about your country. It sounds
interesting, different. One day I’ll cross the ocean.

‘Then you can show me your desert. It will be
fascinating for me, whose home is girt by ocean.’

This is fiction, which grew out of a completely different instance of speaking and not being heard.  However, when I visited America in 2006, I was astonished by how many people informed me that I live in a flat, treeless country. Since the recent bushfires, I think people do now know that we have trees – if only because so many of them got burned. And of course it is true that we have a large interior desert (known as the Outback); but it's also true that the vast majority of us live around the coastal fringe. (For those who wouldn't pick up the reference, the last line has a small irony in that the Australian national anthem, 'Advance Australia Fair' says that OUR home is 'girt by sea.')

I grew up on the island of Tasmania, and now live on the east coast of mainland Australia, where this photo was taken. It's by delightful coincidence that it echoes the photo Magaly uses in her Writers' Pantry #8 at Poets and Storytellers United, where I'm sharing this poem. (Also linking to earthweal's Open Link Weekend #8.)

Ageing: a Dialogue

Ageing: a Dialogue

The walk to the gate became harder.
If I eat this carrot, will it make me see you better?

The lake was flat and glassy, and full of cloud.
Autumn is so changeable, she said.

I wanted to go slowly but you turned it into a race.
The wind surrounds me in a startling embrace.

After the song was sung, and the music tidied away …
The ego is a fragile thing, they say.

Going on from there – oh, if only.
Star-crossed reflections, you and I.



This was arrived at by using my left-over lines and titles from the Poetic Bloomings Exercise in Poetic Thought. I noticed they could be arranged in rhyming (or half-rhyming) couplets, the ones still left over could be used as a title, and the whole thing almost makes sense. I think I could get away with calling it a contemporary ghazal!

Sharing at Poets United's Midweek Motif ~ Walk,/span>

Ghazal of the Air Element

This old poem is the first ghazal I ever tried to write, when I knew very little about the form. The current Poetry Form prompt at dVerse is the ghazal – which has led me to read so much more about it that I now think I might never again give the name to anything less than the strict, classical genre! However, as the dVerse prompt does include the 'contemporary ghazal', I am curious to see if readers think this one falls into that category successfully. 

[We are told: Contemporary Ghazals explore more subjects, are experimental with the 'what and where' of rhymes and refrains and don’t have a formal signature couplet. However, they do keep to single line couplets, pay attention to cadence and are associational.]




Ghazal of the Air Element

I introduce into our conversation
the subject of my death.

He decides to stop studying
and train as a nurse.

He asks where he can acquire
my poetry book.

His torch goes out; he gets lost
in the middle of a forest.

Walking through the bush
he blisters his toe.

Here at home I stub my toe and
burn my arm, which blisters.

Love oh love oh careless love …
all love is in this one.

My soul is crying and crying
the pain of my joy.

Oh darling, my darling
time doesn't stand still.

I sing on the wind and arrange
to meet you later.

I want that you should live
a fine life and strong.


(Written 2007)

Items in My Closet

For day 22 of Poems in April at 'imaginary garden with real toads' we are asked to write on one of several pictures offered from Shay's Word Garden. This one appealed to me:

Items In My Closet

A blotted page of arcane symbols (discarded) as shelf lining –

advanced mathematics: one kind of magic, yes, but not mine.

Pens from the schoolroom: bare nibs, for dipping in 

magic inks to inscribe my preferred symbols: letters.

An old fob watch my Grandpa left me, on which 

when I was young he taught me the magic of time.

(The typewriter he also left me for writing my poetry –

my magic – was much too big to be kept in the closet.)

Before I cast a magic circle, I clear the energy of the space

with a bundle of smoking sage, wafted by this feathered fan.

Oh and those red petals? From a bunch of roses

a lover gave me on a magical night; for infusions.

Missing Selene

Missing Selene

I long to be able to look and see 

through the swirling curtains of mystery.

I find myself blinded and silenced

in the banality of misery. 

She and me in only three years

lived ourselves a sweet history.

Is it the living or the going

gives this knowing of Great Mystery?

Ah, but who knows, oh Rose of the Sea,

of the Moon Goddess now? Where is she?

Notes:

1) My cat, Selene, was named after the Moon Goddess.

2) It's usual in a ghazal to include the poet's own name or some form of it in the final couplet. Rosemary (Latin rosmarinus) means Rose of the Sea. It seemed a nice match with Moon Goddess, turning us both mythic. [Later research reveals that 'dew of the sea' is a more accurate translation, but I'll leave the poem as is, for both the rhyme and the meaning.]
3) I like to create deliberate variations from the ghazal form (inspired by the late John Calvin Rezmerski) – in this case by varying the couplets' final word, but with words/phrases that could mean or include 'mystery'. (Well, I say they could, anyway.)

Linked to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #443