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questionablequalia · 5 months

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In Bloom

You were the spring

a n d

I was the flower in bloom

Joel Lester // Hymns, Proverbs, Poems, and Prophecy.

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gennsoup · 7 months

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no matter where you bury me no matter where I fall I will find my way to water I will find my way home

Marewa Glover, Pounamu

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poem-today · 6 months

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A poem by Erik Kennedy

Another Beautiful Day Indoors

The light lengthens on the carpet, a sure symptom of afternoon. I haven't left the house today because there's only one reason to do that, and I've already got goat cheese. A half moon is only a quarter of the moon. This sky should win trophies. I look at other people, their energy, and think they must have been raised by marmots. I know for the sake of social cohesion we must try to live togetherly, like Bronze Age women and men, but it's been a long week, and, anyway, petrol prices have gone up again.

Erik Kennedy

Listen to Erik Kennedy read his poem

This poem originally appeared in The Moth, No. 35, Winter 2018

More poems by Erik Kennedy are available on the Iamb poets site

#erik kennedy #new zealand poetry #beautiful day

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manwalksintobar · 9 months

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East River // Lola Ridge

Dour river

Jaded with monotony of lights Diving off mast heads.... Lights mad with creating in a river... turning its sullen back... Heave up, river... Vomit back into the darkness your spawn of light.... The night will gut what you give her.

#poetry #Lola Ridge #American poetry #East River #New Zealand poetry #New York City #New York poems #river #night #micropoetry

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midnighttraindemo · 1 year

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four chapbooks of poetry: the first 3 are written and illustrated by dean tercel, and '10 minutes from the well' is written by stan scott and illustrated by dean tercel.

#both were friends of my dad's nd i think there were probably quite limited pressings :')#but a few have some cool little notes from the authors in em #poetry #chapbook #poetry chapbook #woodcut #woodcut art #90s #90s poetry #new zealand poetry #aotearoa poetry

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words-and-coffee · 7 months

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Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

[ID: A poem titled: Kupu rere kē. [in italics] My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth. I have been thinking about this advice. The convention of italicising words from other languages clarifies that some words are imported: it ensures readers can tell the difference between a foreign language and the language of home. I have been thinking about this advice. Marking the foreign words is also a kindness: every potential reader is reassured that although you're expected to understand the rest of the text, it's fine to consult a dictionary or native speaker for help with the italics. I have been thinking about this advice. Because I am a contrary person, at first I was outraged — but after a while I could see she had a point: when the foreign words are camouflaged in plain type you can forget how they came to be there, out of place, in the first place. I have been thinking about this advice and I have decided to follow it. Now all of my readers will be able to remember which words truly belong in -[end italics]- Aotearoa -[italics]- and which do not.

Next image is the futurama meme: to shreds you say...]

(Image ID by @bisexualshakespeare)

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baby-girl-aaron-dessner · 5 months

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Poetry on Palestine

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the-sappho-of-lesbos · 2 months

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Source: The Exploding Frangipani ; Lesbian Writing From Australia and New Zealand -edited by Cathie Dunsford and Susan Hawthorne

#lesbian poem #lesbian poetry #lesbian writing #lesbian history #lgbt #image #lesbian #photo #personal #Australian lesbian history #New Zealand lesbian history

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rhymingtherapy · 1 year

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hear the wind—

whispering in sighs

of all the places she’s been

over water—

transparent as glass,

rippled beneath the silken

fluctuations of her breath

& through trees—

overwhelmed by the

power of her perseverance,

who yield all their lives in deference

RhymingTherapy—February 2023 (my photos Queenstown NZ)

#writerscreed #poeticstories #twcpoetry #poetryportal #photographers on tumblr #poets on tumblr #original photography #writers on tumblr #poetry #nature #landscape #water #trees #sky #mountains #queenstown #new zealand #wind

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wordswithloveee · 7 months

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zeehasablog · 8 months

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My book of poetry "Le Tournesol and other poems" is available to buy online from a number of different worldwide sites!

For Aotearoa New Zealand & Australia:

fishpond.co.nz booktopia.com.au amazon.com.au

Overseas:

- amazon.com United States of America: - walmart.com - abebooks.com - betterworldbooks.com - thriftbooks.com - penguinbookshop.com Canada - indigo.ca United Kingdom - alibris.co.uk Brazil - amazon.com.br Mexico - amazon.com.mx Denmark - saxo.com Sweden: - adlibris.com - bokus.com - akademibokhandeln.se South Africa - takealot.com Japan - kinokuniya.co.jp Korea - yes24.com Taiwan - books.com.tw

SEARCH FOR OTHER STORES HERE

(let me know if you find it on any other website!!)

My website My Poetry Twitter/X

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questionablequalia · 6 months

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Dawn

yellow morning

through the cloud

everything is wet

the sun appears to drip

through the canopy

a n d

the breath can be seen

through the mist

light alights on life anew

a n d

lifts the veil of dawn

listen softly

f o r

nothing whispers

quite like this moment

Joel Lester // Hymns, Proverbs, Poems, and Prophecy.

#poem #poetry #new zealand poetry #creative writing #writblr #writing #poems and poetry #writers and poets #poets on tumblr #dead poets society #original poem #spilled ink #spilled poetry #text #words #poetic

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gennsoup · 4 months

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we are all the sum of what has been and the memory of what shall follow

Phil Kawana, Songs for my children

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poem-today · 10 months

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A poem by Andrew Johnston

THE SUNFLOWER

for Stuart Johnston, 1931–2004

One young bloom in a vase or jar, breath- takingly yellow. And her hands, in the morning light, the way they arrange and rearrange. Death brings lilies, but someone has sent a sunflower: this is our penance, staring at the sun, its blind eye, its ragged halo. The day, in the end, took to its bed before the day was over, taking thee with it. Soon this flower, too, will be dead, its summer of wondering done about the sun, petal by petal: loved me;

didn’t know how; did, unsayably so. It leaves me as he left us, in the dark. From one breath to the next, he’d deflect a question: in his the- ology, I, me, mine were just not done. Because he saw eye to eye with death we can stare at the sunflower all day but his heavenly father’s garden was further than we were prepared to go—its bed of blood-red roses, its promises, its premises, the way everything had been arranged; ‘dead’ a manner of speaking, under the sun. We counted ourselves lucky, hour by hour,

and by the minutes of the sunflower (he doesn’t, he does, he doesn’t know me), each in his or her own way worshipping the sun and coming to other arrangements with death— that it is the end, in the abstract. And then one day someone calls, and you take a deep, deep breath. Sister nor’wester, southerly brother— into the mind of the man we guess our way, blind and deaf, senseless, because he is dead. From the end of the earth I will cry unto thee, as daughters and sons have always done, for words unsaid. The riverbed

was dry and I was thirsty. By your bed, near the end, we could count our blessings: each day, for one thing, and though it was winter, the sun. A sisterly sixth sense, when death began to bloom, flew me from the end of the earth. In a week you were dead but we shadowed one another through the brittle days before you went away. You talked and talked, as you’d always done, of all but you, till you were out of breath. I would have liked to hear—despite your fear of the-

atre (so foolish was I, and ignorant, before thee)— about your mother, for instance, who took to bed when tempers rose; and how the sun had burned a dead- ly thirst into your father’s breath; but the hard facts I craved, my mother knew, were the same stones, day after day, that you buried in death- ly silence, so that in this inscrutable way you could build—for you, for her, for six including me— a house, a plain, safe house, with a sunflower in the garden. ‘That which is done

is that which shall be done’ is all very well in the- ory, but what if the sun were black, and the book dead wrong, and the interval under death demanded a father as unlike his father as day and night? A breath of wind reaches me from the rose-bed; in its vase or jar the sunflower nods politely. Halfway

across the Channel, halfway between waking and sleeping, my mind undone, I had, as luck would have it, something of an inkling. The day had been long; as I lay in the boat’s narrow bed a wave of black joy lifted me and left in me knowledge so dark it shone. I held my breath. Fear fell away, of death, and other fears; the end, in the end, was the darkest jewel. I was dead tired, and fatigue’s mysterious flower spoke perhaps in tongues. But that black sun still shines—a talisman, obsidian, a bright antithe- sis. Its darkness made light of death

at most, however, for me; the death of someone else is something else. Your way led over the border; I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, but wherever I am, my place in the sun you prepared. His earthly power spent, your god, to us, is dead, but it was your belief that gave us breath, the life we take for granted every day. What sense of your sense will I take with me? How much of your world will we hand on? Just before the end, on the wall beside your bed, Peter pinned Leonardo’s St. Anne. Her

smile, wry, reminds me of you, and her hand-on-hip benevolence. Wherever death leads, we can meet here. The power of light in van Eyck and Vermeer. The breath of Wallace Stevens, overhearing his way to work. Every Henry James you read in bed, destiny and destiny like night and day. The valedictory music of ‘The Dead’. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee but when all—or almost all—is said and done sometimes it seemed you believed no less than me that when we die we go into the sun.

There is nothing new under the sun but much of it is mystery: this my mother knows. Her psychological eye revised your the- ological line. They’d converge, anyway, at the library—your rain-cloud, your seed-bed. You read and read and read. And saved your breath not to write yourself, but to make each day bloom and turn. The astonishing flower, head full of edible seeds, bows down dead: this is the credible sense of its death, that here, where its turning is done other journeys begin. It seems to me you believed what you believed, but it strikes me, too, that the seeds you sowed, in the mind’s sun, mattered most. (Sometimes they grew a bed of nails: you were often ‘sick to death’ of fads and feuds, the way they shut out the sun.) Flower of wonder, flower of might: if I see thee on the other side, when I am dead, I’ll know there is an other side. Till then, while we have breath, our burgeoning work is not done: what we have been given is a rich, difficult day

that could go on without us, nevertheless, all day, whistling a cryptic tune. It comes to me in the conservatory, where we catch a little sun: I didn’t know you well, and then you went away but in the day of my trouble I will call upon thee because you were a man to get things done. In its vase or jar, the young sunflower I imagine has served its purpose. Beneath its bed, all along, the river was flowing—deep, where death knows more than we. Sylvia dons her gardening gloves to gather the dead roses. Man cannot utter it, but under his breath:

‘Remember me, my loves, when I am dead.’ Rest on memory’s sea-bed: we will swim down to thee. And in our own blue day, we will gaze at death the way this one young bloom would gaze at the sun. In the garden of the living, my mother stops for breath. Thou thy worldly task hast done. And seeds rain from the sunflower.

Andrew Johnston

Andrew Johnston comments on his poem: “The Sunflower ” is woven from many strands. In 1991 I read John Ashbery’s book-length poem “Flow Chart” and was struck by the double sestina embedded in it (pp. 186-193), which borrows its end-words (among them, “sunflower”) from a poem by Swinburne. In January 1997, newly arrived in the depths of a London winter, I was bowled over by an exhibition of Anselm Kiefer’s sunflower paintings. When my father died in 2004, my brother Peter suggested two passages from the King James Bible for the funeral service; their language stayed with me. I spent November 2005 at a writer’s residence in the north of France. On a trip back to Paris one weekend, I had a revelation in the train: I could use the double-sestina structure, and even Ashbery’s (and Swinburne’s) end-words, plus bits of the King James psalms and Kiefer’s sunflower image, to write the poem I needed to write about my father (there are echoes of many other sources in there, too). I went back to the Villa Mont-Noir and wrote “The Sunflower”.

Image: The Orders of the Night (Die Orden der Nacht), 1996, Photograph: Seattle Art Museum /Anselm Kiefer

#andrew johnston #new zealand poetry #double sestina #anselm kiefer #sunflower

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poems-from-around-the-world · 8 months

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No Ordinary Sun - Hone Tūwhare - Aotearoa (New Zealand)

Tree let your arms fall: raise them not sharply in supplication to the bright enhaloed cloud. Let your arms lack toughness and resilience for this is no mere axe to blunt nor fire to smother. Your sap shall not rise again to the moon’s pull. No more incline a deferential head to the wind’s talk, or stir to the tickle of coursing rain. Your former shagginess shall not be wreathed with the delightful flight of birds nor shield nor cool the ardour of unheeding lovers from the monstrous sun. Tree let your naked arms fall nor extend vain entreaties to the radiant ball. This is no gallant monsoon’s flash, no dashing trade wind’s blast. The fading green of your magic emanations shall not make pure again these polluted skies . . . for this is no ordinary sun. O tree in the shadowless mountains the white plains and the drab sea floor your end at last is written.

#no ordinary sun #aotearoa #new zealand #Hone Tūwhare #poem #poetry #poems from around the world

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lilgayducky · 7 days

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Rakiura - Stewart Island

This island is my anchor

Where trees echo the stories of the land

And rangers laugh and dance and sing

Unleashing the wild child within.

This island is my anchor

Where I will sing with friends until

the fires burn out

And the sky grows dark

Then the eyes of the universe

Will illuminate the path

Guiding the way for tired girls

Safely back to their cabins

And to their beds where

They will rest their tired bones

Prepared for another day.

#rakiura #stewart island #new zealand #girl guides #camping #guide camp #camp #memories #anchor #night #poems and poetry #original poem #poem

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