Black

I'm off for a week, so thought I should post this, inspired to do so by Kmeista.

Stays Black

Kiwi

The sun competes for my soul; the moon betrays my longing.

I stand here in the dark, waiting for my footsteps to begin.

If I lack courage and luck, I will hesitate, and surely miss the call to wander out, surely lose the chance to learn, surely ignore the edict to grow.

But when, as I step out into time and space, time and space envelop me, I can discover all I need to know, all I need to become.

I need to fulfil my destiny.

I know that waiting won’t make me brighter, but dying won’t make me wiser. I know what I know; what I don’t know, I can’t help, but at least I know what I know.

Energy matters, and action spikes my belief. Deep inside, I want that my life will embrace the meaning of an instant. This desire concentrates my ambition. Yet I’m motionless. But don’t confuse my stillness for hesitation. I wouldn’t do this without a reason.

Kiwi Logic

Simple, I stand still for a reason,

I move for a reason, and

I live, and

I breathe, and

I cry

for a reason.

I smell a rat!

I smell a rat before I hear a rat.

I hear a rat before I see a rat.

I tell myself I see a rat, because I smell a rat.

This rat must surely smell me too

Rat v Ratite

The rat reeks of hunger and predation: an odour heralds the advent of a warm-blooded killer, a smell promises violence, a stench proclaims, “Murderer on the loose!”

I don’t acknowledge him.

He doesn’t belong here.

He claims a moral right to be in my world. He will do what he must do to satisfy his need.

But I know what I know.

I see the Hawk’s eyes scanning the ground.

I wait with her.

But the rat doesn’t know waiting. His concern is what he can smell, see, hear, touch, and taste. For him, there are no other senses. He makes meaning of life this way, fresh blood and easy prey. So he moves as quickly as his short legs allow him to move. He races toward me, teeth bared.

I crouch in the darkness, knowing he will soon see me, knowing what he doesn’t know.

He jumps from a distance. He sees me now, lunging toward me. His breath reeks of stale death, his eyes wide, white, and wild. With my heart pulsing red shards of lightning in my arteries, and my eyes burning space into the darkness, all I can do is crouch lower still. Stillness becomes me.

I see his feet in the air, and there they stop, and they drop down for a moment, then they take off from the ground,

and they rise higher and higher.

I hear his cry of shock, disappointment, surprise, understanding; disbelief fading into terror.

Peering out from my hiding place, looking up, I thank Tane Mahuta for the Hawk as she disappears into the tall trees with her new best friend, predator and predator, epicure and entrée.

Now, I must move on. My love waits for me.

On and On

My love waits for me with beauty beyond my expectation.

How could I not fall in love every time we meet?

I need to love, to be loved, to forever be falling in love. We keep our romance aflame without social contracts, or constructions. Simple together, we want only that we carry on into eternity. And, to that end, we copy ourselves onto the fabric of this dimension.

Some parents dread the future and regret the past. We can’t do that; we don’t possess that luxury. Instead, we live inside the instinct of the present. We remain grateful for our offspring, for anyone’s offspring. For what is the future without children? It becomes a pointless discussion, a round of gossip between our hopes, our dreams, and our solid reality.

As we journey along sincerity’s path, humility and gratitude satisfy more than our desire for love, more than our need for companions, more than our instinct for compassion.

Generations of kiwi enter the universe of eternal possibilities. We recognise the responsibility of immortal ambitions. We place our hopes in the hands of what is now forever, and forever now.

Kiwi Creed

Black, black, black

All black is gold.

Black means safety,

Black means victory,

The night pumps black blood through my soul.

But inevitably, the night bleeds into daybreak.

*****************

On and on, the sun competes for my soul. But this lonely sun competes with the universe of time, the universe of space, the universe of no code. Ultimately, the sun must concede defeat to the owner of a higher dimension, the owner of no contests, the owner of no surrender, the owner of no side, the owner of the black.

Always, although the light pierces the black, the black stays intact, stays black.

“Stays Black” Explanation:

This writing came about after reading the beginning of each of the four novels in the paper. By the time I’d finished it, I’d read all the poetry readings, and finished Within the Kiss, Dirty Work, and gotten most of the way through Relative Strangers.

I couldn’t escape a feeling of “blackness” in the pieces. I don’t mean bleakness. I mean blackness. Blackness for me is an appreciation of the black side of the universe and it can involve humour, wit, sadness, happiness, stupidity, hope, despair, anything the author wants. What separates it from other writing is something that may be peculiar to kiwi writing. It’s a knowledge that there’s always something you can’t see, always darkness.

You can shine a light, and that’s a good thing, but what I enjoy about the NZ writers I’ve read so far is their ability to keep some things in the dark.

I haven’t tried to do that in my piece. Instead, I opted to tell the story from a bird’s perspective. This bird can’t fly, can’t escape predators, and can’t enjoy the light. I feel a kinship with the bird.

I’d like to explore the idea of darkness more, moving it out of a kiwi context into a universal area.

Eyesight is not vision

This picture is my creative response to "a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with one another". I'll bring it in to class for people to have a closer look.

For me, this poem is about the horror of the descent into blindness. The page is divided into three sections. The top section represents what is being/has been lost: surefootedness (seen in the dancers in the maze), colour (seen in the flowers) and a place in the world – a place of independence, ease of enjoyment and words. For this reason I chose to paste in the line “Do you see me? I am falling out of a blue sky.”

The middle section, shaped like an eye, represents the blindness that Michele has. I used white tissue paper to create the feeling of blurry white, at the edges of the top and bottom sections can still be seen. Around this eye I have pasted the lines which I thought were most evocative of the loss of sight to this blindness: “Then a pair of taxis went head to head in a distant country so suddenly I didn’t see the difference but it was a wide white threshold.”

The bottom section is the horror of this blindness. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to lose sight and the ability to easily navigate this world, but the final line of this poem, for me, captured that sheer panic: “She is in the dark, perhaps four years old and the future does not exist, screaming and screaming and screaming.” When I first heard this line read out in class, it sent ice cold chills down my spine. The swirling darkness therefore is not the blindness itself but the panic and terror it evokes.

Within the middle of the eye-shaped whiteness however, is the idea that runs as an undercurrent through this poem: Eyesight is not vision. At first I thought this was a hopeful idea, but within this poem it is a terrible burden. The gift of vision, which must come at the cost of eyesight, is unasked for and feared, but is nevertheless a destiny. The journey towards the destination of this gift is laid out in this picture: the falling and then the panic. But what does this vision see? It lays behind the veil of blindness and it as yet unclear.

Hustlerville

Sir Ed's statue

IN MEMORY OF NIGEL COX AND DIRTY WORK

By Gregory Wood

I

Welcome to Hustlerville, a small seaside town at the end of Auckland’s northern motorway. For over half a century Hustlerville has fought to retain an image as a holiday town. But with the growth of Auckland and the extension of the motorway, Hustlerville is fast becoming just another satellite suburb of the metropolis.

Back in the early days however, the leading figures of Hustlerville must have had noble ambitions for this place. They erected an imposing statue of Sir Edmund Hillary in the future town centre and named it Hillary Square. Today, Sir Ed’s statue is surrounded by a little garden in the midst of a car park. Council workers clear away from the small shrubs a daily build-up of fast-food wrappers blown in by the sea breeze. Sir Ed’s statue faces the beach and the sunrise, and nearby there is a small plaque marking the death of Princess Diana. But any ocean outlook has long gone, blocked by beachfront houses, a block of shops and a Macdonald’s drive-in with its endless queue of cars.

Behind Hillary Square is a short dead-end street called George Lowe Place, which is named after George Lowe, who was a member of that famous 1954 expedition when Sir Ed and a sherpa named Tenzing became the first to climb Mount Everest. George Lowe Place ends at the doors of two panel-beating shops, an auto electrician and a tyre depot. Car wrecks in various stages of restoration line the street, its tar-seal scarred by tyre skid marks.

Leading off George Lowe Place is an alleyway called Tenzing Lane, which is named after the sherpa Tenzing. Here, there is a second-hand shop and a parking lot lined with industrial waste bins at the rear of shops. The names of these two mountaineers, Lowe and Tenzing, are used on street signposts to show the way to a semi-industrial area, a dumping ground for car wrecks and unwanted furniture.

“So what is the problem?” a small voice inside my head asked. “Walk one block back from the main street in any town and you’ll always find industry and ugliness. The tourists only see a façade and come away smiling, while the rest of us get on with making money. That is the way it is.”

II

Seeking some sort of respite, I went to Sir Ed’s statue and paused for a moment to ponder the great man, and Lady Di’s memorial. “Surely they wouldn’t put a statue of Sir Ed in such a prominent position just to attract tourists to be photographed next to?” I thought. “He is not a prop; he stands for something.” Just what I did not know, but had to find out for some peace of mind.

I resumed walking along the road engrossed in my thoughts and found a small path, which led to an estuary, where small wading birds gathered. Approaching female walkers nodded a greeting as if relieved that my walking shoes, drink bottle and cap signified a ‘safe’ man.

Further up the path a woman walking a beautifully kept longhaired spaniel pulled off the walkway a long time before I was even near her to let me pass. She was of average height, reasonably attractive, but gave me only a furtive glance. I saw anguished eyes on a drawn face. About fifty metres behind her walked a tall man of solid build and a shaved head. A pair of wraparound sunglasses hid any touch of emotion on the face. He did not acknowledge our passing but stared impassively ahead, not taking his eyes off the woman with the dog, keeping pace with her as if he held on to her with an invisible leash. He seemed to be walking the woman just like she was walking her beloved pet. After reaching a safe distance I turned to watch them disappearing around a small headland. For a sad and fleeting moment the path had become a stage, and two actors were playing out the final scenes in a tragedy play called End of an Affair. My heart went out to the woman; the man looked incapable of changing. He also looked threatening.

Finally, the walkway led to the beach and that first initial blast of salt air. Just beyond the water’s edge, kite surfers skimmed across small waves attached by lines to kite-like sails hovering high above them. At times, they would rise into the air with the force of the wind against their sails. Black-backed gulls reeled overhead, dropping shells onto the sand until they split open, even if it took half a dozen attempts before revealing that treat of fresh shellfish.

The wind strength was perfect for these large seabirds. Once aloft, they can swoop and dive as easily as the tiny common gulls, and turn in huge arcs, their bodies freed by an invisible velocity. When that happens, a walk along the water’s edge is like taking part in an aerial ballet. Look up, and a moving tapestry of sailcloth mingles with the outstretched wings of the black-backed gulls, which seem to revel in the company of an even bigger ‘bird’. One’s senses are overwhelmed with the roar of the wind and surf, and a screeching as the gulls commence diving runs in mock air battles before arcing back around for another game.

III

As the sun went down and cars again lined up outside McDonald’s, I found myself back at Sir Ed’s statue. During that time, someone had placed a red posy of young pohutukawa stems at Ed’s feet. It seemed that the statue was being used as a site of solace, a place to remember and dwell on a distant past with a different set of values.

The wind had died now. Tomorrow, I must bring some flowers for Lady Di. Now, that is progress. And while I’m there, perhaps that first faint touch of a sea breeze will again caress my skin as if being touched by a phantom lover. When that happens, it will be time to heed her siren’s call and leave this modern world for those soft sensuous sands. There, we will hold each other close, her silken hair swirling in the wind as the tempest encircles us and takes us up, soaring and sharing in that incredible celebration of life between Nature and the human spirit.