Poem: Off The Grid
One of a triptych of poems written for my Gethsemane station at Opawa Baptist Easter Journey 2007. The theme for the labyrinth as a whole was 'today's news'. Since climate change had burst into the headlines I wanted to do a contemplative station from the viewpoint of Earth as 'a garden under siege'; a whole-systems, God's-eye overview that invited reflection and confrontation, seeking for hope amid the shadow of approaching disaster.
Accompanying photograph: the city lights of Earth against a black background
Collapse of the industrial, electrical and communication grid is nearly unthinkable to me, one of my deepest horrors, yet in many places on Earth right now - and everywhere only a few centuries ago - such isolation and self-reliance was the norm, our ancestors perhaps stronger for it. And in contemplative prayer we approach that same void willingly. Jesus in the Garden faces the loss of all supports and yet remains unscathed. How can I detach myself from my cybernetic cocoon and listen for the peace within?
off the grid
no cellphone
no pda
no broadband
no Wurlitzer
no Edison
no Gutenberg
no monk
no crier
no scribe
outside
alone
dark
signal
Poem: Equinox
One of a pair written for my Last Supper station at the 2006 Opawa Baptist Easter Journey. Accompanying photograph: Cashel Mall at The Crossing. Music: Dido, Rhian Sheehan.
My theme was quietness in transience. I picked a fast food motif for the Supper table. Trying to make a place for reflection and rest in the rush and the hurry, before the oncoming darkness of winter and the Passion. Also trying to anchor my spirituality in the discrete here and now of Christchurch, Easter 2006, where New Zealand's inverted seasons turn a Northern Hemisphere spring festival into a dirge of autumn; how we confront an alien land's church calendar here must necessarily adapt. This poem reflects the physicality of a moment in time. I still love it.
Equinox
Christchurch at Easter
is a rain-slick labyrinth
daylight saving's cut out
and we're stumbling into autumn dark
the clock ticks, sunset closing in
shops shut early
traffic backs up Moorhouse Ave
Cashel Mall fades, grey to black
now and here's a window
just one moment
as the busker pauses
and the dance floor breathes
to steal such quiet
as we can
make spaces
in between the notes
drink coffee on Colombo Street
and listen
Poem: God of the Streets
One of a pair written for my Last Supper station at the 2006 Opawa Baptist Easter Journey. Accompanying photograph: Cashel Mall at The Crossing. Music: Dido, Rhian Sheehan.
My theme was quietness in transience, with the motif of a fast food restaurant. The other poem was a reflection of Christchurch at Easter as a time and place. This was its counterpart, a contemplative prayer. I have spent too many hours walking the streets of Christchurch. It's a walkable city. But there can be a great sense of absence when winter closes in. And although I feel the inward call to meditation, there is a drivenness inside me that finds it hard to mentally detach and slow down.
I came so close to using The Exponents' 'Christchurch (In Cashel Street I Wait)' as background music, but it was sadly just too loud. Dido's 'Do You Have A Little Time' and Rhian Sheenan's 'Sunshine' won instead. I sneaked an Exponents reference into the poem instead.
God of the Streets
God of the streets
God of the arcades
God of the car parks
God of the escalators
God of the rush and timesheet
God of swept hours and broken minutes
God of appointments and interviews
God of fast food and slow traffic
I hear the quiet calling me
I ache to answer it
I reach for time and miss
My soul is full of noise
I can only offer you
A temporary table
By the window looking out
On a construction site
I'd build you a cathedral
But you said: I'd rather have you
Poem: Angel Falling
I remember when Columbia first launched in 1981, the big fear was that the heatshield would melt. And I remember the shock of Challenger in 1986. Watching it happen again, in the run-up to the Iraq War, felt like an omen, a demonstration. This is what happens to democracies that aspire to empire. Torn apart by the bow shock, of the impossibility of becoming something they are not.
I don't know if that future, of a world without America, can be averted now. Perhaps there is still hope. Even if the worst comes, there will be hope. But not for the specific forms in which we used to give that hope a name, a shape. That moment is past, torn, burning gases already through the hull. The world is tumbling onto a new trajectory and it will hurt before we heal.
Angel Falling
(for Columbia)
into a cold blue sky
from cloudless black
our day has passed;
there is no turning back
the sun will rise again
on other shores
we who once glanced the moon
shall fly no more
beyond this sullen cloud
of scouring flame
a thunder sobs
across the fatal plain
no words can break
the dark that lies ahead;
bring out your palls and grieve
the future's dead
Poem: What Flames May Come
In the 1980s I used to dream of nuclear holocaust, even though I lived in New Zealand. It's not so much an actual dream now, just a dull ache. A tool wants to perform the function for which it is built in the same way that water wants to run downhill. A bomb is a desire for explosion given material form. Why do we have desires that we don't want to release?
What Flames May Come
I woke from cold sleep, sweating, numb. The TV
blared a band of white noise, headlines
smashing half the screen: IT'S HAPPENED. MASSIVE -
turned it off. I knew already; saw the sky
- in dream a half hour earlier -
the purple haze of ion sheen, white flash
sears city blocks to dust. - What did you think?
I said to no-one - Internet's offline today,
routes crashed with traffic - build these
things, deploy them, they get used, people
will die. It's what we're made for. What we do.
We ache. And in the vacuum of the updraft
burn.
Poem: Gilgamesh
Probably a bit pretentious. But I'd just read Derek Hines' wonderful translation of Gilgamesh and it had dawned on me for the first time that Ur -> Uruk -> Iraq. How old that region of the Earth is, and how entwined its history with war. Submitted to www.poetsagainstthewar.org in 2003.
Gilgamesh
The walls of Uruk now
are stenched with dust;
two-fifty klicks from Baghdad
as the coalition planes
stir shadows with the drone
of EM lock-on, target paint.
There was a king here, long ago
burned bridges sky-high;
war crimes stank to Heaven.
Hewed the cedar forests,
glared the Sun's dark rays,
spat out the plague
crashed finally, a comet
damned by stars themselves.
These satellites
know none of this;
they serve no god but Ada
and her consort SIPRNET.
The old songs bore them.
Hear instead the clicks of their
plutonic dreams;
an algorithmic envy
cold as Ishtar.
Were I Gilgamesh
and dredging that
eternal starlit black
I would say: do not seek
iron ore, petroleum, or bauxite
let them burn and rust
on battlefields
the victor shall not speak
in steel
put out your hand
and write your fate in clay.
Poem: X-Ray
Back when Guantanamo was first set up it was called Camp X-Ray. I had just seen Rabbit Proof Fence and there were reports on how tigers in Baghdad zoos were getting pre-war stress. There was a sense of the whole Western world caught in the floodlight of its own media and having no answers. The troubling aspect of official military torture seemed to me then as it does now: that it represents not a lower, but an upper bound on how civilised a society is. Not how we act in safety, but what we resort to in our extremity is who we truly are. The terror of being confronted with that self-knowledge still has not left me.
X-Ray
And we are all now
in Guantanamo
blinking in the light
of our most naked truth
dripped from needled veins
as this actinic glare
scorches soul and bone
calls us who we are;
rabbit at the fence
tiger in the cage
we bite electric wire,
bloodied paw and fur
with fear: it does not get
more civilised than this.
Poem: Vigil
Written after a candlelight vigil early 2003 before the war. Knowing it would not hold back the night but yet... we do things because we must, not because they bring us power.
Vigil
We stand at twilight's edge
between the light and dark
with candles in our hands
and silence in the trees
the day is running low
the leaves are autumn gold
and in the wind a chill
that prophesies of rain
do not mistake our peace
for abdication: no
this moment will go on
until the world is saved
Poem: Peace Is A Luxury We Can No Longer Afford
I kind of like this one.
Peace Is A Luxury We Can No Longer Afford
there is no denying it:
these are now hard times
in a global repression
securities will be exposed
it will be prudent for us all
to become economical with the truth
and learn to ration
our lies
we must tighten our belts
conserve compassion
reduce unnecessary expenditure
on frivolous externalities
like faith, hope
pity, doubt
we have learned to live without them
before and will do so again
love
is the single greatest thief of power. kill it.
without ruthlessness
we can save nobody
Poem: Unconventional Weapons
A random antiwar poem from 2003 reflecting on the peace movement.
Unconventional Weapons
How do you fight
when your enemy is no-one?
What do you fight
with?
A knife won't do
goes through ideas like butter.
Bullets, useless
even teflon coated armourpiercing hollowpoints.
-Blam blam-
Missed.
Hard buggers to target,
those abstract nouns.
But we'll get 'em,
all, in the end. You'll see.
War, terror
famine, death.
They've got a headstart
six thousand years plus of hatred.
Nukes
and AK-47s
full-spectrum geosynchronous air-space theatre dominance
blunt rocks
Apaches
COMSATINTELNEOLOGISM
and
poison gas.
Us, we've just got
hands, eyes,
faces.
Hardly seems like a fair fight.
Maybe they need
a few more tanks?
