TUESDAY POEM – HOW NOT TO BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

The poems filed on the Tuesday Poem this week have, at first glance, an air of youth and music and playfulness about them, along with a dose of darkness in its many forms and the fear that lurks when the lights go out. The poem at the hub is Midnight Sonata by young poet Rebekah Tysoe previously only published in the literary journal JAAM. An intensely musical poem with some startling language, it is about ‘being afraid of the dark’, and begins

Inert, the shadows fall, almost
loud enough to break
the pale silence of the street.

 The editor this week who made the selection is Bachelor of Communications student, poet and blogger Bernadette Keating – another young talent who files a poem every week on her blog ilikesweating.  This week she has more on fear of the dark by the UK’s Roger McGough.

 After that, you have a choice of another 20 or so poets on this NZ-based blog via the live blog roll which hosts poets from as far afield as Tipperary and Boston. Included, is a take-your-breath-away experimental poem by rising NZ poet Johanna Aitchison - which came out a Palmerston North poetry salon (also on a Tuesday) led by NZ poet Jen Compton.  You can find Lucky Lucky Life on a joint blog by Helen Lehndorf and Helen Heath.

And then there’s Saradha Koirala – also young and up-and-coming, who has posted a villanelle about being short-sighted at twilight. And for the first time this week,  a young poet from the Philippines has posted a Tuesday Poem that deals with another kind of darkness - the fall-out from  the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991. 

Oh, and there’s so much more besides to discover – written and posted by young and old alike- a stunning sestina by Andrew Johnston on the loss of a father, a poem by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman to environmentalist and writer Peter Hooper, poems by Alan Dugan, John Griffin, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh,  Lorna Goodison, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Janis Freegard and Peter Clayworth. And there are still more being filed as the day goes on.

What you dive into with the Tuesday Poem is an astonishing community of poets who are generous, inclusive and incisive, and who live in different countries, who are young and old, are afraid of the dark and afraid of death, but are linked by this NZ-based blog, drawn together by their love of poetry and a desire to share and to learn. The cross-blog conversation is always stimulating and the ‘conversations’ between the poems often surprising.  Today is no different. Drop by here.