Fraser Dron » Poems

Whakatū

admin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:04:34 +0000

Each morning the waves cough up a ransom of sand-dollars.
We laugh, scorning the very notion of ransom,
and build the dunes and sea-walls higher.
The sea in its grief dashes madly against the rocks at Wakefield quay;
it sulks at us from beyond the saltmarsh.

We call it reclamation;
re-education would be closer. A hundred years
and half a million pounds, it cost, but in time,
the daughter of the sea learned to love her captors.

The sea will never give up though.
It paces up and down Tasman Bay, broadcasting loss in the voices of gulls.
It waits for the day we pack up and ship out,
leaving a destitute Nelson to creep back to her mother.

Super Fourteen Semantics

admin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:03:49 +0000

“Smile! We’re all on this crusade together!” bawls the billboard
in round and playful letters
not half a K from Masjid Annur.

The Crusaders wield foam-rubber swords; there are no Saracens.
For Palestinian desert dusts, a manicured turf.
Their massed ranks pose for the camera, clean
and unbloodied.

Connotations afflict a name like flies a soldier’s corpse;
While memory’s fresh the flies are thickest. When only bones are left,
connotations have nothing to eat.

These crusaders ignore the mosque;
from atop the overbridge they anticipate their conquests,
those other bearers of catchy names…

Will they someday play the Inquisitors or Conquistadors?
Picture the marketing departments,
wondering whether the words are long-enough dead
to exhume
and sell.

These Thoughts Accost You in Shanghai

admin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:03:05 +0000

(In the centre)
What does it mean that a boy with no arms dances
outside the subway platform, to his scar-faced colleague’s keyboard?
What of the granny who grabs your elbow
- how artful is her dirt?

How many oranges and small coins separate a pragmatist from a sucker?

(On the edge)
Cold plucked ducks, birds on a wire
hung out to dry; laundry and poultry share the same frame.

Half the shops are past tense, green-fenced.
The municipality is claiming this street
house by crumbling house
turning the neighbourhood out.

(Everywhere)
You can see it rising behind the bricks:
the Pearl TV Tower, dagger in Shanghai’s concrete fist
impaling the fleshy sky.
The sky bleeds grey, spattering the city,
oozing seaward.
Grey splashes on every shoe; all are complicit
directly or by proxy
in the bleeding-out of winter.

Lewis Pass

admin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:02:20 +0000

Wind the windows down.
Even under snowfall the forest wafts in,
snow-sharpness softened with humus.
The black road bristles at the edges,
beefeater beeches black and furred with road-dust
and summer’s honeydew.

Pull over on the verge.
Only the cold can keep you civilised;
were it warmer, you’d run naked-footed,
daring the border guards to let fly their wasp-vollies,
to try and stay your wild flight into the ferns -
as if they could!

Drive on, but keep the windows down.
Until you reach the icy bend near Springs Junction,
you can breathe the snow-beech-earth…
The unbending forest studiously ignores
your very presence.

Alpine Ghazal

admin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:00:27 +0000

When plates shift, we all must dance to their slow music.
The holy high places are laid low – but – oh, music!

I’m calling out, a small thing among these hills:
are you close enough, if you hear, to know music?

Where I grew up, the mountains had imported names.
They knew their older names in winter-snow-music.

You would be salt for the roads, warmth for the journey;
would I be pilgrim enough, though, Music?

I’ll chip away at the rock face, blow by blow
and find – in me – a safe place to stow music.

I have ears, limbs, two good lungs. I have the words!
But Fraser, you risk an avalanche! You must forgo music.