A few of my poems.
Glossa on Walls
from Mending Wall — by Robert Frost
“Something there is that doesn't love a wall…
Gaps… at spring mending-time we find them there…
I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out…
He only says, Good fences make good neighbors.”
That whine of the mosquito coming closer —
did I leave a window open, a door ajar?
Maybe there’s a new hole in a wire screen.
That relentless, high-pitched, complaining cry
You’d think it wouldn’t matter, her single bite.
But stings itch. They insert a toxic virus
of words no barrier, no wall, can stop.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall…
The double-brick walls of my bedroom fail.
Curled in bed, shriek and roar — leek under door —
nothing can block the whiskey crescendo or rage.
An iron ash tray chips, clangs, ricochets off the wall.
After the brawl, the dark gash on her eyebrow crusts over.
Her swollen forehead turns purple, green, and fades.
In dream, I jump off a cliff to fly away — but only fall.
For a fortnight after, she’s drunk in bed.
Food runs out. She’s an absence in the house.
Gaps… at spring mending-time we find them there…
Like a stab in the chest, something wakes me.
Only the ceaseless crash hiss — waves against cliffs.
No. There it is. A scream, distant. Odd scream.
I go outside. He stands on the edge of the pool.
She’s in it, out of her depth, begging for air.
He uses the leaf-catcher on its long pole
to push her back under. I look on, frozen dumb.
His eyes turn, catch me staring. He stops.
He pulls her out. What defence is a wall?
I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out…
He takes my hand, “I want to show you something.”
The stench along corridor grows stronger —
in her room, stale wine breath, stale pee and puke.
Naked on the bed, spread-eagled, her hand moves
between her legs. He says, “she will not have me,
so I will show you how to be my little wife.”
He tells me to kneel, puts his penis in my mouth,
his hand behind my head to stop me pulling back.
When I ask the next-door man if a kid should tell,
he only says, "Good fences make good neighbors".
394 words,© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 30.9.19
~ ~ ~
Unaware (a Gazal)
I have loved you a zillion ways, unaware,
from infancy to aging days, unaware.
You’re the life-force in a lover’s eyes while he
spends his semen making babies, unaware.
I see you in the Corella’s somersault.
Your glee, in her screech as she plays, is aware.
Hatching little fish in mangrove estuaries,
you’re in the Moon’s every phase, unaware.
You’re in the Sun’s photon rays that succour life
and boil greenhouse gases in your gaze, unaware.
You Big Bang. You atom. You dark matter. You,
the energy that wields and weighs, unaware.
I, Manna, love you a zillion countless ways
while you revolve in your displays, unaware.
© Manna Hart 111 words @ 120 pm = 0.925 minutes / 1 minute
~ ~ ~
Lantana
When I first saw you look at me, I had no doubt
that you loved my tutu skirts, flaring, swirling out,
my red, orange, yellow, my soft or flaming pinks,
my long, arched stems, that step from side to side,
wild hip twists in wind whistled kinks,
as my loins astride your legs let the rhythms ride.
Strong, spicy musk was my invitation
to join in propagation.
What a partner you turned out to be
when, from South America, you first smuggled me.
Oh, you could keep me tamed in cooler, temperate climes;
you could prune me, hedge me, and plait me into vines.
But I’m the hot lady — whom only frosts can kill.
By my sweet black berries, my colonial will
calls every Fairy-Wren
to spread my seeds wherever she comes to sit
and nurture them with sweetly fertile shit.
So here in hotter, wetter climes, I am queen.
Though I wear flamboyant flowers, seductive as Lambada,
if you eat my leaves, you’ll get runny, poopy scours,
and you’ll be puking sick for endless hours.
I will taunt you — be your bane — for I have no enemies,
no real foe among your arsenal of natural remedies.
I am the fragrant honey pot, the femme fatale Lantana,
the comely, fecund ["fek" + "uhnd" ], weedy lady
who claims your forests shady.
And I will never rest ’til I have won.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum,
~ ~ ~
Climate Change
Reading it in the news---
When I first understand it---
it flash-burns my neurons.
All over already.
Dead and cold,
ashes all.
Might as well be.
Cool, clammy skin.
Breathing, rapid, shallow.
Pressure-prickles in my neck.
Energy drains, dizzy spins.
Lie down, close eyes.
No! It cannot be.
I would rather be dead than
admit it into consciousness.
Oh, please! Let me be numb and dumb.
Leave me be. Let me block it out.
If I don’t see it, don’t feel it, I’m sure
I’ll be alright.
© Manna Hart — 113 words @ 120 ppm = 0.9416 mins / 1 minute
~ ~ ~
Grief hovers
Grief hovers over my shoulder,
nudges sore at the back of my eyes.
chokes my throat, hollows my chest,
robs me of my stomach.
What fruit can I offer you, dear Earth?
Oh, you teacher who showed me how to love,
the fragrant flowers on your grave have died.
Sandlewood and myrrh have turned to ashes.
What candle will burn to light this darkness,
this blight through all the extinctions to come?
I think of striking a flame, and recall
it was the smoke that started the dying.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 90 words @ 120 ppm = 0.75 min / ¾ minute
~ ~ ~
Faint hearted
Kids sway,
standing in heat waves
off tarmac.
A thousand stand at attention
in ranks and files.
Some drop; gaps in rows appear.
Headmaster McGuire drones on and on.
Uniform — white shirt under
four pleated layers of forest-green nylon tunic —
suck up sun.
Salt drips, eyes sting, itchy skin, dizzy.
Vision prickles silver grey.
Blackout.
Nurse’s first aid room — ice-packed forehead.
Back home, Dad drills.
“What happened, when, where, how, why?”
“Who made you stand like that?”
“Right, tomorrow you start a campaign.
You’ll wear your own clothes, cool and comfortable,
until the headmaster agrees to change the uniform.
At playtime, you’ll ask the other kids to do the same.”
Back at school,
Kids laugh, jeer — I’m up myself.
I want to go hide and do,
In a narrow gap between the Bessa block buildings,
Alone again.
Someone tells the teacher.
Bell rings. Here she is in the corridor
catching me before class.
“Do you want to be a martyr?”
Christians pray in the Colosseum.
Gore pours on the dirt as lions devour them.
“I’m sorry, Miss Clark. What’s a martyr?”
In her eyes confusion flashes,
long in-breath, loud sigh.
“Never mind. Tell me why you
urge the girls to boycott the uniform.”
She listens and says,
“Mr McGuire will ring your father.”
It was the one time Dad backed down.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 219 words @ 120 ppm = 1.825 mins/ 2 mins
~ ~ ~
Who mourns?
In the year 2050
is there any awareness
able to remember Earth as she was?
Who will recall the scents
of tallowwood flower,
bloodwood gum?
Who will recall the far reach of bull-koala’s chatter-grunts,
his hoarse huff-gruff growl-groans at night?
Where will koala and joey be?
Long gone, habitat and fodder starved,
inbred, immunity lost,
red-eyed chlamydia blind,
all will have died.
By 2050 and nine degrees Celsius warmer
only extremophiles remain,
single celled organisms
in sulphurous volcanic pools.
Who will moan for Earth as we once knew her?
Who will cry for a cooked coral reef,
the once cool blue world of carnival colours,
the spawner of life for oceans —
who among the dead in their bleached white barrens.
Who will sing of the droughts so sere they dried our tears
long before
the sand-grit-winds shredded the flesh from our bones.
152 words @ 120 ppm = 1.266 mins/ just over 1¼ mins, © Manna Hart, Tyalgum
~ ~ ~
Impermanence
As they have for millions of years,
these trees tower.
Tears for all of this that so soon dies.
Softly they are dressed
in damp velvet mosses, liverworts,
festooned with stag-horn epiphytes,
here and there, punctuated with platters of orange fungi.
Drunken fragrances commingle,
damp earth, leaf litter,
fallen fruit fermenting.
In narrow gaps, lianas
interweave wrought-iron lace.
Between dark leaves
glint fragile lines of webs.
Tiny spiders like fire opals hang suspended,
wrap their insect prey in shrouds,
or suck their ichor.
“Womm-poo”, the fruit dove calls,
in his pale grey, yellow, purple and turquoise plumage,
Bowing to his mate.
Trees open into colonnades
on either side of water running over rounded rocks.
Branches arch into vaults.
From above the canopy of back-lit lime leaves,
the sun’s rays lance the air at forty-five degrees,
land on fern, crimson anemone fungus,
and lapis-lazuli dragonflies
mating in aerial ballet.
Tears fill my eyes,
tears for beauty,
for millions of years of evolution in demise,
for carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide skies,
for the Celsius degrees as they rise,
tears for all of this that so soon dies.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 183 words @ 120 ppm = 1.525/ just over 1½ mins
~ ~ ~
Dreaming the Haploid
It was no chance
that atoms linked
twixt light and heat
in the seas of primal brines.
Nor that atoms touched,
grasped, coalesced,
grew green,
and covered the Earth.
For they collided countless zillion times,
to build the first of RNA,
and chancy as it seems,
what happed
could never not.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 54 words @ 120 ppm = 0.45 min / ½ a min
~ ~ ~
After Weeding
My twenty-litre back-pack’s empty, all cleaned out
and stashed in the shed.
For nine hours along the north fence today,
I cut every seed-head,
filled a twenty-kilo bag to later burn,
and each clump, each crown of spears, I spot sprayed.
Still the work’s not done.
Tomorrow I must try again.
Where the spray ran out, in-edible grass still grows,
and there’s a field of soil like a bed
where panicles will shed a thousand seeds to sprout.
From far afield the seeds fly in when the wind blows.
Some well-meaning farmer thought Parramatta grass
from far subtropical Africa would work better
than the ones he’d tried to bring from colder clime.
Against weeds there’s no such thing as a win,
only control — like housework ever left undone,
that tries to make the whole a worthy sum.
I’ve scrubbed the blue-dyed poison from my skin,
and let the hot shower ease my shoulder muscles,
though it couldn’t ease the bruises,
nor leach the aching worries from my brain.
On the couch, I sink withered and fatigued.
Warm summer rains will wet the grass tonight.
The good grasses will prosper
while the sprayed suffer blight.
And though it never is, I must let it be enough.
Eyelids — as heavy as my body — sink shut.
Nineteen foals I raised, trained and rode;
nineteen loved.
For this the best seeds sow, good grasses grow.
And all I know, the wind peels away all.
One wrong seed’s enough to rock the balance,
labour’s only vain, and only nature wins.
Of atoms built of space I was born.
And back into that space each atom spins
and in between is all,
but nothing dreams,
in the realm of sleep at last.
© Manna Hart, "After Weeding", 296 words = 2.95 minutes at 100 beats per minute, slow, classical, subtle
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Responses?
from Mending Wall — by Robert Frost
“Something there is that doesn't love a wall…
Gaps… at spring mending-time we find them there…
I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out…
He only says, Good fences make good neighbors.”
That whine of the mosquito coming closer —
did I leave a window open, a door ajar?
Maybe there’s a new hole in a wire screen.
That relentless, high-pitched, complaining cry
You’d think it wouldn’t matter, her single bite.
But stings itch. They insert a toxic virus
of words no barrier, no wall, can stop.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall…
The double-brick walls of my bedroom fail.
Curled in bed, shriek and roar — leek under door —
nothing can block the whiskey crescendo or rage.
An iron ash tray chips, clangs, ricochets off the wall.
After the brawl, the dark gash on her eyebrow crusts over.
Her swollen forehead turns purple, green, and fades.
In dream, I jump off a cliff to fly away — but only fall.
For a fortnight after, she’s drunk in bed.
Food runs out. She’s an absence in the house.
Gaps… at spring mending-time we find them there…
Like a stab in the chest, something wakes me.
Only the ceaseless crash hiss — waves against cliffs.
No. There it is. A scream, distant. Odd scream.
I go outside. He stands on the edge of the pool.
She’s in it, out of her depth, begging for air.
He uses the leaf-catcher on its long pole
to push her back under. I look on, frozen dumb.
His eyes turn, catch me staring. He stops.
He pulls her out. What defence is a wall?
I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out…
He takes my hand, “I want to show you something.”
The stench along corridor grows stronger —
in her room, stale wine breath, stale pee and puke.
Naked on the bed, spread-eagled, her hand moves
between her legs. He says, “she will not have me,
so I will show you how to be my little wife.”
He tells me to kneel, puts his penis in my mouth,
his hand behind my head to stop me pulling back.
When I ask the next-door man if a kid should tell,
he only says, "Good fences make good neighbors".
394 words,© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 30.9.19
~ ~ ~
Unaware (a Gazal)
I have loved you a zillion ways, unaware,
from infancy to aging days, unaware.
You’re the life-force in a lover’s eyes while he
spends his semen making babies, unaware.
I see you in the Corella’s somersault.
Your glee, in her screech as she plays, is aware.
Hatching little fish in mangrove estuaries,
you’re in the Moon’s every phase, unaware.
You’re in the Sun’s photon rays that succour life
and boil greenhouse gases in your gaze, unaware.
You Big Bang. You atom. You dark matter. You,
the energy that wields and weighs, unaware.
I, Manna, love you a zillion countless ways
while you revolve in your displays, unaware.
© Manna Hart 111 words @ 120 pm = 0.925 minutes / 1 minute
~ ~ ~
Lantana
When I first saw you look at me, I had no doubt
that you loved my tutu skirts, flaring, swirling out,
my red, orange, yellow, my soft or flaming pinks,
my long, arched stems, that step from side to side,
wild hip twists in wind whistled kinks,
as my loins astride your legs let the rhythms ride.
Strong, spicy musk was my invitation
to join in propagation.
What a partner you turned out to be
when, from South America, you first smuggled me.
Oh, you could keep me tamed in cooler, temperate climes;
you could prune me, hedge me, and plait me into vines.
But I’m the hot lady — whom only frosts can kill.
By my sweet black berries, my colonial will
calls every Fairy-Wren
to spread my seeds wherever she comes to sit
and nurture them with sweetly fertile shit.
So here in hotter, wetter climes, I am queen.
Though I wear flamboyant flowers, seductive as Lambada,
if you eat my leaves, you’ll get runny, poopy scours,
and you’ll be puking sick for endless hours.
I will taunt you — be your bane — for I have no enemies,
no real foe among your arsenal of natural remedies.
I am the fragrant honey pot, the femme fatale Lantana,
the comely, fecund ["fek" + "uhnd" ], weedy lady
who claims your forests shady.
And I will never rest ’til I have won.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum,
~ ~ ~
Climate Change
Reading it in the news---
When I first understand it---
it flash-burns my neurons.
All over already.
Dead and cold,
ashes all.
Might as well be.
Cool, clammy skin.
Breathing, rapid, shallow.
Pressure-prickles in my neck.
Energy drains, dizzy spins.
Lie down, close eyes.
No! It cannot be.
I would rather be dead than
admit it into consciousness.
Oh, please! Let me be numb and dumb.
Leave me be. Let me block it out.
If I don’t see it, don’t feel it, I’m sure
I’ll be alright.
© Manna Hart — 113 words @ 120 ppm = 0.9416 mins / 1 minute
~ ~ ~
Grief hovers
Grief hovers over my shoulder,
nudges sore at the back of my eyes.
chokes my throat, hollows my chest,
robs me of my stomach.
What fruit can I offer you, dear Earth?
Oh, you teacher who showed me how to love,
the fragrant flowers on your grave have died.
Sandlewood and myrrh have turned to ashes.
What candle will burn to light this darkness,
this blight through all the extinctions to come?
I think of striking a flame, and recall
it was the smoke that started the dying.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 90 words @ 120 ppm = 0.75 min / ¾ minute
~ ~ ~
Faint hearted
Kids sway,
standing in heat waves
off tarmac.
A thousand stand at attention
in ranks and files.
Some drop; gaps in rows appear.
Headmaster McGuire drones on and on.
Uniform — white shirt under
four pleated layers of forest-green nylon tunic —
suck up sun.
Salt drips, eyes sting, itchy skin, dizzy.
Vision prickles silver grey.
Blackout.
Nurse’s first aid room — ice-packed forehead.
Back home, Dad drills.
“What happened, when, where, how, why?”
“Who made you stand like that?”
“Right, tomorrow you start a campaign.
You’ll wear your own clothes, cool and comfortable,
until the headmaster agrees to change the uniform.
At playtime, you’ll ask the other kids to do the same.”
Back at school,
Kids laugh, jeer — I’m up myself.
I want to go hide and do,
In a narrow gap between the Bessa block buildings,
Alone again.
Someone tells the teacher.
Bell rings. Here she is in the corridor
catching me before class.
“Do you want to be a martyr?”
Christians pray in the Colosseum.
Gore pours on the dirt as lions devour them.
“I’m sorry, Miss Clark. What’s a martyr?”
In her eyes confusion flashes,
long in-breath, loud sigh.
“Never mind. Tell me why you
urge the girls to boycott the uniform.”
She listens and says,
“Mr McGuire will ring your father.”
It was the one time Dad backed down.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 219 words @ 120 ppm = 1.825 mins/ 2 mins
~ ~ ~
Who mourns?
In the year 2050
is there any awareness
able to remember Earth as she was?
Who will recall the scents
of tallowwood flower,
bloodwood gum?
Who will recall the far reach of bull-koala’s chatter-grunts,
his hoarse huff-gruff growl-groans at night?
Where will koala and joey be?
Long gone, habitat and fodder starved,
inbred, immunity lost,
red-eyed chlamydia blind,
all will have died.
By 2050 and nine degrees Celsius warmer
only extremophiles remain,
single celled organisms
in sulphurous volcanic pools.
Who will moan for Earth as we once knew her?
Who will cry for a cooked coral reef,
the once cool blue world of carnival colours,
the spawner of life for oceans —
who among the dead in their bleached white barrens.
Who will sing of the droughts so sere they dried our tears
long before
the sand-grit-winds shredded the flesh from our bones.
152 words @ 120 ppm = 1.266 mins/ just over 1¼ mins, © Manna Hart, Tyalgum
~ ~ ~
Impermanence
As they have for millions of years,
these trees tower.
Tears for all of this that so soon dies.
Softly they are dressed
in damp velvet mosses, liverworts,
festooned with stag-horn epiphytes,
here and there, punctuated with platters of orange fungi.
Drunken fragrances commingle,
damp earth, leaf litter,
fallen fruit fermenting.
In narrow gaps, lianas
interweave wrought-iron lace.
Between dark leaves
glint fragile lines of webs.
Tiny spiders like fire opals hang suspended,
wrap their insect prey in shrouds,
or suck their ichor.
“Womm-poo”, the fruit dove calls,
in his pale grey, yellow, purple and turquoise plumage,
Bowing to his mate.
Trees open into colonnades
on either side of water running over rounded rocks.
Branches arch into vaults.
From above the canopy of back-lit lime leaves,
the sun’s rays lance the air at forty-five degrees,
land on fern, crimson anemone fungus,
and lapis-lazuli dragonflies
mating in aerial ballet.
Tears fill my eyes,
tears for beauty,
for millions of years of evolution in demise,
for carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide skies,
for the Celsius degrees as they rise,
tears for all of this that so soon dies.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 183 words @ 120 ppm = 1.525/ just over 1½ mins
~ ~ ~
Dreaming the Haploid
It was no chance
that atoms linked
twixt light and heat
in the seas of primal brines.
Nor that atoms touched,
grasped, coalesced,
grew green,
and covered the Earth.
For they collided countless zillion times,
to build the first of RNA,
and chancy as it seems,
what happed
could never not.
© Manna Hart, Tyalgum, 54 words @ 120 ppm = 0.45 min / ½ a min
~ ~ ~
After Weeding
My twenty-litre back-pack’s empty, all cleaned out
and stashed in the shed.
For nine hours along the north fence today,
I cut every seed-head,
filled a twenty-kilo bag to later burn,
and each clump, each crown of spears, I spot sprayed.
Still the work’s not done.
Tomorrow I must try again.
Where the spray ran out, in-edible grass still grows,
and there’s a field of soil like a bed
where panicles will shed a thousand seeds to sprout.
From far afield the seeds fly in when the wind blows.
Some well-meaning farmer thought Parramatta grass
from far subtropical Africa would work better
than the ones he’d tried to bring from colder clime.
Against weeds there’s no such thing as a win,
only control — like housework ever left undone,
that tries to make the whole a worthy sum.
I’ve scrubbed the blue-dyed poison from my skin,
and let the hot shower ease my shoulder muscles,
though it couldn’t ease the bruises,
nor leach the aching worries from my brain.
On the couch, I sink withered and fatigued.
Warm summer rains will wet the grass tonight.
The good grasses will prosper
while the sprayed suffer blight.
And though it never is, I must let it be enough.
Eyelids — as heavy as my body — sink shut.
Nineteen foals I raised, trained and rode;
nineteen loved.
For this the best seeds sow, good grasses grow.
And all I know, the wind peels away all.
One wrong seed’s enough to rock the balance,
labour’s only vain, and only nature wins.
Of atoms built of space I was born.
And back into that space each atom spins
and in between is all,
but nothing dreams,
in the realm of sleep at last.
© Manna Hart, "After Weeding", 296 words = 2.95 minutes at 100 beats per minute, slow, classical, subtle
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Responses?
