Tuesday, February 05, 2013

TUESDAY POEM - GRAB A BITE OF ETERNITY



The NZ-based international poetry site Tuesday Poem is back - and into its second week of 2013 - with They Could Have Stayed Forever by Joan Fleminga haunting prose poem posted by Orchid Tierney. Joan Fleming is currently living and working in Dunedin, as is Tierney who explains,

This poem was written to accompany an exhibition of photography by Kate Van Der Drift, made up of large scale, high-key outdoor scenes of abandoned holiday places. These quietly still, beautifully eerie photographs, taken near Israel's dead sea, convey a sense of migration, emptiness, and change.

The poem begins...

There’s a free beach somewhere close to here, where everyone’s covered in sand. And everyone knows that sand is time, or time is sandy, and all the barriers are striped, red and white, like Christmas candy. But no-one’s there. They couldn’t find the rhyme for fun hiding in their pocket money. 

For more (who could resist? follow the link above.)

Last week, Tuesday Poem hosted a poem from another poet living in the deep south -- the Robert Burns fellow 2013 David Howard. It's called Always almost, never quite and was posted by Claire Beynon who hauled in a bunch of fellow poets to quiz Howard on the poem -- the result is a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. Here's an extract:

For most of us it will be winter
          Three seasons out of four.

Marylinn KellyAre you saying that (for most us) time is 3/4 not about producing, growing, flowering, emerging but rather existing in a dormant state? Is that wasteful or desirable? 

DavidWhile my daily experience is that most of us are dormant most of the time (we often call it ‘being busy’), which I find wasteful rather than desirable, I also own the problem - logical and psychological - of becoming. It’s a contradictory matter; it often seems to me that ‘contradictory’ and ‘matter’ belong in the same sentence. As a child I intuitively subscribed to Parmenides’ notion of block time. Its most prominent adherent is Einstein, who was taken to task by Popper for a view that reduces change to the status of an illusion. While I am intellectually uncertain about essentialism I write from the imaginative position that what is, is; everything already exists, and for always.

                        Nothing comes from nothing,
            The universe is eternal, like first love.
            It is hungry work, returning.

Yes, so why not grab a bite of eternity at Tuesday Poem? - once you've read the hub poems check out the sidebar with 30 poets from NZ, Australia, the UK, US and Italy who post a Tuesday Poem every week. 

No comments: