Tuesday Poem – the natural world, its beauty and terrors, one week after the quake.

One week after the earthquake that devastated Christchurch, Tuesday Poem has posted a poem which celebrates the natural world in the language and rhythms of the tribal people of northern Mexico. As the curator’s note says, ‘it is good to be reminded of the beauty of the natural world - as evoked in the Rothenberg work - as well as its terrors.’

And in the posts of the thirty poets linked to Tuesday Poem – five of whom live in Christchurch - there are poems which respond to the earthquake – directly or indirectly. Many have found the earthquake has silenced them, others have reached for poems written before that express what they want to say now.

For example, ‘Flutter’ by South Island poet Brian Turner is the Booksellers NZ choice of poem this Tuesday, and it has these lines:

It's hard to carry loads of grief
in the summertime, the freight of
dead stars consigned to sidings
in vacant corners of the sky…

And this, from Christchurch poet Catherine Fitchett:

This poem is not a sarcophagus.
This poem is not a mausoleum.
This poem is a brown cardboard box
sufficient to bury one dead blackbird
found on my garden path.

From Christchurch poet and author, Helen Lowe,

a voice on the radio
talks about what it means
to be . . . human, beating
against each other, asks
who will pick up
all the shards …

From Jennifer Compton’s ‘Epicentre’:

I couldn't write a poem
for every earthquake
I have lived through
they all have their little quirks …

Alicia Ponder’s poem is written about what she’s seeing coming out of Christchurch now:

Even as they rail,
Even as they grieve,
Standing tall
Together
Against an Earth
That just won’t stand still.

The hub poem is an excerpt from 15 Flower Variations – which is derived from the Yaqui Deer Dance songs by poet-translator-anthologist Jerome Rothenberg using literal translations by Carleton Wilder et al. It was chosen by this week’s editor, Wellington Art History student and poet, Bernadette Keating.

She comments, ‘Tuesday Poem thrives on contemporary poetry but it's hard not to appreciate the variational verse that carries this poem, and for me it resonates with the idea of nature as part of a diurnal cycle that constantly turns on itself.’

Visit Tuesday Poem at http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/