Political Works

bad weather

I hear you are having bad weather
 while here it is cold but settled
and Nameed tells me it is not unseasonal
 he tells me also he has a good
  manager unreasonal
this is my neologism
for places reason can go but it is
  not allowed
Nameed is Pakistani
  in Saudi Arabia
Every day he is outside at six am
he has reason to know how cold a day it is
 he compares it with Pakistan
I am from New Zealand
 we are both in a hotel room
 and he is making the bed
I know there is a region of the moon
called the Sea of Tranquility

New Zealand is as far away
 in my imagination
 as Saudi Arabia had been
  and before September last year it
was the last place I'd have dreamt of
 to come Sajib is here today
 making my bed a cyclone hit
  the North Island yesterday
shit flowed into Wellington harbour it
filled the harbour the Beehive
 doesn't really look like a beehive
 but like a toilet vent of the sort
you see capping the pipe to stop rats
  from entering
  the sewerage system where
they find fat and other tasty
   morsels to eat
the two Jans used to take me
to the debating chamber at
 Parliament House to
  put me to sleep. A
real boys' club in those days.
Fart jokes and newspapers. I have seen
 the latest AI images released
  as part of the election
   campaign Mare Cognitum
 Serenitatis Mare Tranquillitatis
Lacus Doloris Sinus Honoris Sinus
Amoris on the moon I hear
 the Atlas Network are
way up inside promoting the agendas
  of 1984

I hear you are having bad weather
forever that knowledge is hard to bear
 but will you be meeting friends
  in Bahrain Jalal drove us
 around sometimes in a taxi
a van with a tan roof sometimes an
 ordinary car to avoid the airport
 tarifs What do you do, Jalal, I
  asked him, when you're not
doing this? I meet with friends
 talk play cards drink tea black
 tea not like Turkish straight
no sugar yes no sugar we make a big
  pot always a big pot of tea
The moon announcing the beginning of
Ramadan the crescent moon is expected
 but has not been sighted I love
 Ramadan the houses in my village
  all open their doors everyone
   goes from house to house
it is my favourite time Jalal said
 but my house sometimes is locked
 because I have friends to go to
too

the worst scene everybody says this
 the most frightening in 1984 is
when they put the rat cage on John
 Hurt's head and it has nowhere
to go because the cage made of wire
 in the film has the shape of a
funnel which widens to fit his face
 where leather straps hold it
the rat of course wants to
 escape it runs around inside
until discovering the funnel it
 thinks the man is a means of
escape with his soft skin it runs
 at his face which is a camera
by now I imagine his teeth did he
 fight? like the man's who
attacked Wayne in Myer's Park or
 dissociate? and live with the
shame of what happened like
 everyone does

not long to go
 he might have said to himself
not long

when I think about the Roman
Empire I think about John Hurt as
 Caligula and

Messalina the queues of men all
like Epstein
 
...
 
(17 February 2026, Riyadh)
 

works of mourning

to write as if no story hangs
to write as if no story hanged is
 is hanged
to write as if the works
 of a better poet
  as Borges says if

   as if the works
were not those of mourning or
hanging over those there there
was not were no hanging faces

clothes, to write as if no, not
faces worn hanging and fabric torn
by hands heads, and teeth left on fences
the wind ripped has each a piece and the
hands torn heads teeth of fabric

dear & close, from a single-use plastic bag a
to write from a single use from each from no
hanging clothes never worn never driven shop-
ping never carried home in yours or my

aching arms to write as if no story attached
to bearing or burying children to be buried
to rite by others right by others by as
Pessoa's others   Celan's almonds

to write as if no darkness overhang
the folds of night clothes
and women in mourning to write
as if no morning overhang or hand

or fingers as they fumble as if the fumbling
were like a skirt around the knuckles
reading love and hate, as if the poem we needed
and we needed the poem

to make a diagramme into the night to write
to dig our way out and no our
of a shallow open deep
grave or garden
 overhanging
  ____

(16 November 2025, Riyadh)

what do you want to say, Shirley*

It's so quiet here and
  although a force of light and love has left the world
 I can't hear any laughter

the loved one died
 and everything she touched is distant
 Shirley kept her in a plastic bag which we planted

under a tree when our dog also died.
 Strange that all I can hear
 is laughter. Shirley kept her

in the campervan until her return to Riverhead
and  although Lotte was blind
she led the way, for our dog, Ariel,

 they ran away together. Again,
they would return in the summer,
  and again, Lotte would lead the way for Milly

our daughter to the top bunk in the campervan
where Shirley and she would read books. In the
summer, Zachary, our son remembered her

and Lotte. Perhaps you say
  as if it adds to your collection, this is just the way
  you process grief but I can't make

the requisite connection. So quiet here
Once   once upon a time Shirley was an actress
and Dad who she called Tony Taylor visited her in hospital

noting the difference in their ages, the nurse asked
What are you doing here?
We're running away together, said Dad. And,

an orphan, she did, in the Southern Players.
  once upon a time there was theatre here
  only the second theatre company ever in New Zealand

He was, she said, so naughty,   then, so was she
  from a girl, who   although she never had a bad word
for anybody, it didn't mean she didn't say it,   and

I never saw a cloud darken it, had a lucky face. Mum, whose
connection with her was difficult and professional, directed
her in A Place on Earth and I remember Ted her husband

from this period. He was proud, a proud man, and
  after he died she became a gypsy,
with adopted families,  staging-posts, along her journey

She shrank, returning every summer with still such startling
hair, shorter, still strong, gin on the verandah,
until her doctor told her to go south, and she sold her campervan,

for her ashthma, but for all the shrinking of the world
  into a breeze-block frame, as uncomfortable to say
as it was to see her in, she had no bitterness in Port,

was she reading when it caught fire? no bad word
(except about a close and mutual friend, He knows
  nothing about theatre. Theatres in fact were closing

(everywhere). And she came to a chair. And a small bed.
  and mainly very kind people around her, perhaps
with more and more connection,   who can say?   to them

and to the past, as, when we get older we are said to have,
  the requisite connection, then   so it is,
  but also a statement of my grief, selfish

to feel, a thread break, that I can't make connect, to a world
  of run-aways, of naughtiness without malice, Shirley knew,
  Shirley-Whirly knew,   and if I or if anybody should

ask, were you with her, were you with her, in the end,
  and what did she, or what do I, believe, in the end
  I would say   I'm with her,

to try and add a little of my own
  to that force of light and love
  she was

...

*What fun!

for Shirley Kelly
19 March 1931–2 November 2025

[note that the spelling of Lotte is ... a bit of an in-joke*]

(9 November 2025, Riyadh)

some lines after Jim Moore*

Jim Moore writes,
Sometimes the world won’t let itself
be sung. Can’t become    a poem. And

Sometimes, REM sing, everybody hurts and cries
sometimes. I know the world is wrong

I know sometimes a man is wrong, sings
David Byrne, and—Michael Stipe, Hold on

Take comfort—whereon shall I take comfort?
Show me, growls Leonard Cohen    the way

in a song, we are sane sometimes Jim Moore writes
sanity is not enough, he says, but is it—

sane to sing? is it wrong    some
Times won't let themselves be sung

the world won't let itself become a poem
this is the subject of Paul Celan, Ché-lan,

A Romanian in Paris who would not leave it
for Jerusalem, who would not let himself

become a Zionist and condemned himself like
Kafka to write in German, like Wyndham Lewis

in Canada. Celan attached himself to his bureau and
threw it in the Seine, and himself, his subject

was also the wound of the Holocaust
which is in the wind, which in the wind

is the smell of almonds. Die Welt
lässt sich nicht schreiben, Theodor

Adorno said something like, for the world
after Auschwitz to let itself be written

in a poem is barbaric, sometimes, at
mornings and at nights, a man

plays with the snakes he writes, writes
Celan, and drinks, he drinks the Seine

but it's not enough. O say, poet, Rilke
was asked, Rainer Maria Rilke, his full

name clogs up the line, what you do?
I praise, he answered, But the dreadful

and monstrous, how do you hold out, how
do you take it? he was asked. I praise,

but, but, insisted childishly his
persistent critic. I praise, I praise

was the reply. What right have you, in each
costume and every mask, to say true?

I praise. And for the silence and the
fury, like star and storm, to know you?

Because I praise. The prick of a rose
was said to announce the poet's sickness

because the wound never healed. John Burnside
relates the story—and to the photograph of

Nimet Eloui Bey for whom he was gathering
roses a sad story is attached: Lee Miller

took it. Her affair with the great
Egyptian beauty's husband, as she was

acknowledged to be, led to her
suicide. In Paris, although

the story is disputed. Adorno must
have had in mind the barbarism

specific to the times and
civilisation—and the wound

grew and grew and she drank
and drank like the poet in the Seine

who didn't see it that way. Before him
the massacre. Into the same Seine

police head Maurice Papon drove the
Algerians. And after him into the

final darkness Benjamin Netanyahu,
the sons and daughters of Palestine

and their sons and daughters and,
from the preceding generations,

Palestine. The world let them
be taken and their poets taken

because sometimes the world
won't let itself be sung. Can't

become a poem, who will stop it?
Who will stop song will also stop

memory. We are some time after
Celan, but not so long, Listen

   from the silence
   to the silence

Who gave you the right,
the persistent critic babbles

to the fruit of Paradise or
the name of Palestine, and

takes it away! show me Jim Moore
writes in a poem, if you can,

show me, sing, he means but writes
how to be you.    Silence

the silence that he says he loves
beyond any reason or defense,

so praise him    to the silence
that continues after song

because without praise there is none
and in the darkness, because without

praise . . . for the same reason then
with the same defense. As clever as

the fingers that pick the apples
that throw grenades into the schoolyard

thrown below by the young men
and women of the IDF

like apples, praise the young
they are like apples, the younger

down below, like petals, they
are singing, down to us

as simple as this,
who does the silence praise?

and who, the darkness?
who does the silence serve?

and who, the darkness?
I'm thinking of a poem
as clever as this.

(26 May 2025)

*Jim Moore, poet