Political Works
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 and 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
