Category: 2014

1 | 2 Hearts and rips   Heart that goes swimming, be aware of rips. Rips occur often at beaches you frequent, where waves build and break, where you launch yourself into turbulent flow.   All that water which waves push up has to go somewhere. It drains, it channels to…

1 | 2 | 3 Going home haibun   Just south of Numeralla the Rose Valley Road forks by the pines at the cemetery. One branch leads right, down to the crossing. Out through the inn’s open door music spills, lanterns flicker gold from the windows. A boat waits on…

1 | 2 | 3 Russian New Year with Gurdjieff    She insists she feels better but after she runs up the long staircase to her first floor bedroom quickly without holding the banister Katherine collapses.   Moonlight catches blood from her mouth like flickers of fire – hand to…

1 | 2 | 3 Are all the pilots down?                 for my father   He’s seen rainbows from above and knows their secret – they’re juggler’s hoops rolling through the sky.   He’s followed the curve of earth turning by below his wings, shared eagle’s sight, defied weight and…

Brothers-in-arms   You used to buy each other a beer now and again in the RSA. Max’s war was Korea, after yours, but you never talked about war. There were all sorts of things you didn’t talk about, even though you were neighbours. His wife, Norma, went drinking with other…

Ngawhatu On the Richmond bus to Nelson passing Polstead Road you only had to say it, and everyone knew, unspoken we almost dared not look, it stirred such potent thoughts caused laughter, mocking, and a deeply seated superstition innuendo out the window, the road that leads to there To where?…

Yellow Feathers   I’d been teaching in the old Infectious Diseases Hospital – we’d been talking about voice for four hours. I went to the AIDS Memorial Garden to unwind. First I saw the sign: Men Doing Tree Work. Then, from the white gum’s vast spread of branches thick ropes…

Some thoughts about writing ‘Yellow Feathers’   I took my new poem to a poetry group held in a busy pub in Melbourne city. We were crowded around a long table with our glasses of cider or wine or juice. I only knew one person there and she left early…

War Bride, Part Two, Sixty-five Years On   Sarah wasn’t used to the traffic, just as she wasn’t accustomed to the rain and gloom of a wet autumnal English afternoon, which made the headlights of the oncoming traffic even more distracting. But she was determined not to let any of…

My Writing Process   I have been writing for New Zealand Classic Car Magazine as their Bay of Plenty correspondent for a number of years now, which means I am attending annual events for the umpteenth time. For me, a classic car aficionado, this is no hardship. It is a…