chrisringrose

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 30: The Morning After

So we reach the end of the thirty poems in thirty days. Thanks to all who read and commented on them throughout the month. Helen Cerne provided the opening metaphor of this one, and Jill is celebrated here as my No 1 reader and inspiration!

The Morning After

Screwing off the cap

of the stubby fountain pen

on the last day of April, feels like

running into the stadium

for the last laps, and

hoping that the crowds

have not gone home for tea.

But the best part has been

you, beloved, quick to share

midnight’s latest poem

beside next morning’s coffee.

We muse over Uncle Harold’s fate

taste again the rain at Tamarama

get tousled by a windy day

beside Achmelvich Bay.

A walk in the bush,

a hand in Christ’s side

a grandchild’s smile

or the ghosts of Beverley.

We revolve those moments together,

add in some lost words,

taste the shimmer of the days

before we launch into our new one.

CR April 30, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge, 2025: No 29: 1950

In early childhood, World War II was all about us, even if we didn’t think about it much. It was there, for example, in some objects, in the missing iron railings, the vestiges of attempts to confuse potential invaders, and in the bearing of certain adults.

1950

We grew up in the shadow of the war –

half took for granted what it left behind:

the grubby ration books kept in a drawer

or missing signposts hidden from the Hun --

although our town’s name was still visible

in rainy stains above the clinic wall

that showed where ‘Beverley’ had been

defying all attempts to wipe it clean.

We skipped along the walls of the Town Hall

and dodged the metal stumps where all

the iron from the railings and the gates

had been sawn off and melted into tanks –

so we believed; the truth was more mundane.

Our teachers earned their hard-won gravitas

as Chindits under General Bill Slim

and could be coaxed into a tale or two

before the clock crept round to four o’clock.

Our houses held the mundane spoils of war:

a varnished hand grenade upon a desk,

the heavy, fusty tent my best friend’s Dad

had hauled back with his kitbag from Tobruk:

even we could see they spoke of luck.

CR April 29, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 28: A World Made of Rain

It was at Tamarama Beach NSW, in summer. Never seen rain like it. Warm and glorious, and impossible to escape, so soak up the energy!

A World Made of Rain

Tamarama, NSW

The gutters turn to Highland burns

their gratings gulping, choking.

The life force in those fleet fat drops!

They drill down vertically

deliver bouncing slaps to the promenade

burrow into the beach with a thousand thuds

dive and vanish into the surf.

Our flattened hair is streaming

our lashes weighted with water

that spills to our mouths like warm Perrier.

Soaked already, we’ve abandoned

Hopes of shelter. The liquid assault

on our shirts is laundering them,

gluing them onto our backs.

It will end in ten minutes

and turn to steam and birdsong

but for now we lift our faces, bombarded

by the everyday elixir of life.

CR April 28, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 27: Reach Out Your Hand

Encountering again today that startling moment in John 20:27 and being drawn into thinking of its literal and modern equivalent – moments of trust that are also moving, but in a different way.

Reach Out Your Hand

‘Reach out your hand

and put it in my side’

moved at hearing of Thomas’s act --

that extraordinary moment

its intimacy, the invitation

to trust and touch,

imagination travels to the theatre

with gowned and masked figures

bent in concentration

over human souls prone,

delivered to the knife

the testing, probing fingers

both intimate and distant

in their sides.

CR April 27, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 26: Walking Home

Three snapshots from two continents – two delightful, one ominous (in 1992, Northern Cod populations fell to 1% of historical levels, due in large part to decades of overfishing). The Northern Lights are still there. Not sure about the French musicians.

Walking Home

Five minutes of the Northern Lights

as we walked home in Alberta

in the first year of our marriage

electric flounced green curtain edges

draped across the Canadian sky

the waving edges of some divine jellyfish

Guitarist, sax player, bassist

had dragged some chairs

onto the pavement of the Place Vendome

as we walked back to the hotel

the door to the empty café still open

Hot Club jauntiness, echoes from stone

all for free -- for the most select of audiences

Nova Scotian trawlermen admiring

 the freshly caught grandfather of all gadus morhua

fresh from The Grand Banks

it blocked the harbour path we walked

a mouth fit to swallow footballs

flanks rippled like Carrara marble

but twenty reckless years later --

moratorium on the northern cod

CR April 26, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 25: At Burns Beach, Altona

A familiar landmark to all those who walk along the beach at Altona. I see it most weeks and it never seems to get any more decrepit, slumped there like a monument to stubbornness and inertia.

At Burns Beach, Altona

The very definition of coming to a stubborn full stop.

She got this far and collapsed, sinking

rib-deep in the beach, aground in her own grave.

She looms at low tide, first as a swirl in the surf

then a prow locked in sludge,

a broken tiller hammered into the sand,

her six cylinder casings still glossy with enamel

as if ready to chuckle into life and call all aboard.

Twice daily the tide strains to refloat her, retreats defeated.

Hopeless. She’s set in her stationary ways

baked and battered, crusted and corroded

most unglamorous of wrecks.

CR April 25, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: Poem No 24: Freddie Ray

Our youngest grandchild, born to Matthew and Mairead on October 30, and already spreading the life force and joy around us all. Fun to use meter and rhyme, albeit with a slight hiccup in line 11. Rumpelstiltskin appears in line 4.

Freddie Ray

The oldest story in the world

and yet the freshest ever told:

a tale of love, and birth, unfurled:

the straw of life spun into gold.

Life calls you forward, day by day

your limbs, your power to beguile,

strong eagerness to touch and play

your curling grip and sudden smile.

Born to outlive us all and yet

the gifts exchanged from us to you

and you to us will see us through

you bear a promise to renew.

You hold a torch of burning light

and sound a bell that makes us chime –

our charming, daily, welcome sight

our talisman to outdo time.

CR 24 April 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 23: The Field of Vision Test

Back from a visit to the optometrist’s and reliving the slightly anxious, disorientating experience of gazing into the Zeiss Field Analyser, seeking fleeting spots of light and hoping you don’t have blind spots. Naturally, the account of the experience turns philosophical.

The Field of Vision Test

I’m eye-patched like a pirate.

Today we chart the field of vision

by staring into the optometrist’s dome,

a clicker under my thumb.

The machine stirs, groans softly

as it mimics the moments of cosmic creation.

I anxiously await the appearance

of the first stars in the firmament.

Here they come, some plumb centre

like suns, others drifting on the edge

of sight or consciousness

ghostly apparitions that gleam and fade.

What that a speck of light?

A moment of vision? Or hallucination?

CR 23 April 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 22: Midnight is the Best Time

Romantic? Moi? But if you can think of better times and places, add them below!

Midnight is the best time

to write poems

the day’s thoughts and visions

drip on to the page

like pungent espresso

from the gleaming machine

in the Caffe Novecento

Castel Sant’Angelo

noisy sunlit Rome.

Dawn is the best time

to read poems –

emerging from your own dreams

to track someone else’s

across a bent-back page

as if doors opened onto windows.

Still in pyjamas

in a quiet Melbourne kitchen

finger hooked in a favourite mug.

CR April 22, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 21: We Were Just Kids

A phrase I’ve always liked – and it excuses a lot, as I’ve tried to suggest in the first stanza. But I was also thinking about how time can ‘grow heavy’ at unexpected moments in one’s youth – and not necessarily in a bad way. A glimpse of wisdom.

We Were Just Kids

eagerly grabbing our first fistfuls of life

insufferably chastising our elders,

inventing love, eager to taste,

and drink in, distant lands.

Parties had not become a chore and

our opinions were held fast --

albeit by foundations of sand.

We laid the hourglass on its side

and cast our careless flowers on the tide.

But sometimes we felt time grow heavy

at a wedding or in a hospital ward,

or maybe at a glimpse of Mum and Dad

looking suddenly older across a room.

At times like those we’d be stilled by the weight

of the oldest and simplest of words --

be made solemn as though we heard nearby

the whispered beginnings and ends of our lives

in phrases immemorial like

“I do”, “don’t go”, and “goodbye”.

CR April 21, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 20: Surveillez vos voisins âgés

Memories of the house in Mortagne sur Gironde in the August 2003 French heatwave with no aircon. The first couple of days are the worst, then you get used to it. But for a while there you feel like abandoned like the voisins âgés. Though for them it was no joke.

Surveillez vos voisins âgés

The tarmac’s melting where they patched it last week

in shiny squares where the road raises a mirage of itself

the doorlatch’s hot to the touch as I retreat indoors

walls a meter thick but still the film of sweat glues onto warm skin

sunglow though the closed shutters is a vertical white crack

a hoopoe delivers its name fifty times from the neighbour’s dusty garden.

Old people are at risk, says the radio repeatedly: ‘Surveillez vos voisins âgés’.

Their families are en route for Arcachon, arguing in a traffic jam,

the old French folks anaesthetised on wine, home alone like Macaulay Culkin.

I don’t like ceiling fans they tickle the hairs on my arms and legs

as I sprawl on the bed, the heat pinning me into submission

like a sticky wrestler, only I can’t flap my arms in surrender.

Could climb in the car or walk to the beach down the path where pines ooze sap

but I’d prefer to turn down my thermostat of vital signs

and corpse it out till nightfall like un voisin âgé.

CR April 20, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 19: The Crystals, Williamstown

Amazing, the sea life a few meters off the promenade here in Victoria: we share the city with fish. It’s a special treat to see a seahorse or sea dragon. Thanks to Kate Robinson for the photo taken here on April 18.

The Crystals, Williamstown

First the stone steps, rough underfoot

disappearing into the green world

and warmth of The Bay in April.

We float mask down over our bluestone Atlantis

with seagrass pulled this way and that the tug

of currents on pale green kelp like tough lettuce.

diagonal squads of pipefish thrum past

flickered by sunlight and shade.

Then the day’s prize: a seahorse, head reined down,

a studious, segmented, green chessman

his skin stretched over bony plates

prehensile tail anchored to a frond

his pale brood pouch crammed with miniatures

about to be puffed into the world

propelled into the tide and their chances.

CR April 19, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 18: Moving House

There’s something forlorn about standing for the last time in a house you’ve sold, before you lock the door and drive away. I’m funny that way – I don’t even want to drive past it again.

Moving House

No socks or Lego bricks upon the floor

two curling fliers in the letterbox

The brisk removalists are in their van

and all the goods we once invested in

are strapped or packed in with them on the road.

The drawing room looks bigger, hollowed out,

and carpets dinted where the chair legs stood,

The shiny ghosts of hands upon the doors

give testament to five who dwelt within.

Like brittle things that stay on when the lives

they used to host depart -- seashells, and gourds

and skulls -- the house is hollowed out

its windows stare out at the lengthening grass.

CR April 18, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 17: Downhill Descent

This is my coded political poem, so it’s not really about those daring reckless mountain descents in the Tour de France. Maybe the outcome is wishful thinking, though as Joseph Chamberlain said in 1886: ‘In politics, there is no use in looking beyond the next fortnight’.

Downhill Descent

Fantastic! It’s so obvious

that this is the way to do it:

swift downhill,

chin on handlebars

spindles whirring

faster than the doubters

believed it could be.

The wind grabs your hair

The crowd lines the descent

and cries out your name.

But on a sweeping bend

you were confident of navigating

the tyres slide sideways.

One midair moment to see

it was all too ambitious

and you weren’t in control.

Bang! And the dazed world looks weird

the wheels still spinning in place

the sky reeling

CR April 17, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 15: First Love

Maybe first love is always inseparable from anxiety, on one side or another . . . or both. Its freshness means it’s inevitably doomed. I realise the reference to the folded note dates the poem, and that the last two lines don’t really redress the balance. But they do allow a neat closing rhyme.

First Love

First love was always

fraught with fear and loss –

anticipation of the ache

that would invade you

if she or he should turn

their back away

or send a folded note

via a smug friend

who might stand there

to watch you read it.

Announcements of departure

were always a possibility

despite the brush of soft lips

and the murmured forever words

after the walk home from school.

Today an SMS

the inevitable cut just as cruel.

CR April 15, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 14: The John Landy Butterfly Collection, Melbourne Museum

Wide flat drawers can be pulled out to reveal the comprehensive collection of Australian butterflies -- stunning in colours, shapes and sizes and testament to the athlete/politician’s obsession and patience. It’s wonderful, and yet…

The John Landy Butterfly Collection, Melbourne Museum

The symmetry and neatness of the drawers! --

enough to make one hold one’s breath

faced with the evidence of tiny deaths

whose vividness elicits wild applause.

It’s strange to see the ranks of those

who never could ‘master the art

of flying straight’ lined up millimetres apart

and marshalled into military rows.

But no visitor could view without a pang

these ranks of stiff enamelled wings --

as human eyes peer down on to the pins

from which the little creatures hang.

The legs like blackened jointed thread

that trod on petals, launched the flight

in various and glorious delight,

now clutch the carboard base instead.

Here is the Moonlight Jewel, and

there the Fiery Copperbutterfly

glowing, dipped in molten dye

its wings still opening their flaming band

It’s quiet here, where hushed footfall

surrounds each artwork on its metal spike

they’re trophies, yes, but surely nothing like

a hunter’s bison head upon a wall?

CR April 14, 2025

[chrisringrose]

April Poetry Challenge: No 13: Suddenly the sun

A memory of a moment of illumination out of nowhere in a dark time. They say there is no such thing as purely black ink – only intense other component colours. I think what I felt then was there are no purely black days, only hidden other components. If that makes sense . . .

Suddenly the sun

lit up the roof of the barn across the farmyard

flooding its overlapping waves

with cooked earth colour.

And I don’t know why but a dark day dissolved

as though that warm minute

could swell like soaked paper

on which the past and future was written --

the text blurring, spreading, leaking,

as the black ink turned blue and ochre

in a release of component colours

CR 13 April, 2025