|
Space
You feel that physicists who disbelieve in space
have never watched the way big raindrops trace
their path through poplar leaves, or how a puff of air
there flutters at a single glinting spray
while all the rest hang still; or ever lain and stared
up into their bright stories, dizzied, as the sun
rays beam down midges. You imagine they
have never scrambled up among the branches
even in their minds, and clung there mid-way between one
depth-sounding heart beat and another; they had launched
themselves into some other vision, more unfathomable by far,
where ideas fly out in a canopy of insubstantial stars.
Mothballs
It is said that most house dust is human skin
which is flaking off us all the time : a little grim
as explanations go, but necromantics take their theory ghoulish.
Seriously though, as water nears the boil, as if it formed
the sudden thought, from seeds too small to see, it f1ourishes
in bubbles; just as men once knew dead flesh
condenses into maggots in the sun. So similarly, germs
of dust start, secretly in shadows, or in livid beams
of moonlight very faintly, icily; or in a splash
of sunshine densely, patently alive. The darker stuff that teams
in stagnant air congeals thus. From its grey festoons the very soft
wings stumble upwards into moth.
Matter of Gravity
The birds, first ones to feel the gravity of the situation,
fall out of the sky, conferring to the air their agitation.
More deliberately, in all the trees the branches bend
down, loaded with themselves, and many break;
while underneath the stream the fishes feel themselves descend
the trench of water pressure in their dwindling tinsel.
In the humus, worms and leaves become the flakes
of aeons. On the bubble, we are rushing headlong out
into the dazzle; time arrested; mass immeasurable.
The air around our planet gives a stupefying shout.
We stumble, clap our hands against our ears
and step so deep into our shadows that we disappear.
Nicholas Messenger had his first poems published in New Zealand as a schoolboy
. He won the Glover Poetry award in New Zealand in the 1970’s. In 2006 he has had poems published in
About The Arts, Blackmail, Boloji, Coffee Press Journal, High Altitude Poetry, Identity Theory, Jacket,
Monkey Kettle, Off Course, Pulsar, Taj Mahal Review, Web Poetry Corner and WOW. He has had a few small
one-man shows of his paintings.
He was born in 1945, and after completing a degree at Auckland University,
travelled extensively in South America, and lived in Europe for several years.
For a long time he made his living as a teacher, of science, art, and languages,
in High Schools in New Zealand, where he was a long-standing member of mountain Search and Rescue
organisation. Now, after nine years in Japan teaching English, he is running a small home-stay business
in Hokitika, New Zealand, with his Japanese wife. He has two grown-up children from a previous marriage.
Email: Nicholas Messenger
Return to Table of Contents
|
