Wine is bottled poetry – Robert Louis Stevenson

Note: For some reason my blog appears with Pacific time as the header which is a day behind NZ time so I have decided to write the date in brackets if significant.

Tourism NZ has now labelled New Zealand ‘Middle-Earth’ so that’s fine though my father seems a little bewildered by the analogy and I don’t know what Captain Cook would have thought about it seeing he was convinced NZ was in the Southern Ocean.  This information we gleaned from reading The Press while waiting to see a nurse at Wairau Hospital to check my father’s pacemaker. I tried to explain but it’s a bit like trying to explain the Internet, Google and Smart phones.  Being interested in the share market he does get the success of a company like Apple.

   Since he had his stroke he doesn’t always remember about the pleasantries like ‘Good afternoon’, ‘thank you', and so on. The first thing he said to the nurse was that he had heard some upsetting news on the radio which he wanted her to confirm. It seems that if someone with a pacemaker is cremated the device can explode. She reassured him that the doctor would know so he wasn’t to worry. He has a plot already marked out at the Picton Cemetery alongside my mother so he really doesn’t need to be concerned.  He just thinks someone should have told him instead of being informed through the media.  ‘Well seeing you’re talking about it’, she said, ‘let me tell you that a pacemaker doesn’t prolong your life. When your ‘natural time comes to go’, it won’t stop you.’ Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to accompany him! My neighbour later told me that there is a doctor in Dunedin who has a museum of pacemakers and some get sent to him when they are removed.  Earlier ones she said were quite large.  I don’t think I’ll tell my father that.

The Hobbit

   One thing I really like is live television.  While I’m writing this (Wednesday 28 November), I’m half listening to TV One screening live from Wellington for the build up to The Hobbit movie, the red carpet, Tamati Coffey speaking elvish and sporting those ears and an interview with Peter Jackson (in red sneakers), Mark Hadlow and the Air NZ Boeing 777 aeroplane flying over Wellington decorated with hobbit images. Independent Booksellers’ Page and Blackmore (Nelson), recently posted on Facebook to remind everyone that it was first a book. I own a rather battered copy which belonged to my mother. Who’s your favourite hobbit and will you go to see it at the movies or wait for the DVD?

Artisan market

   The artisan market in the mall is attracting a lot of interest.  There was an article in the Marlborough Express yesterday. There’s furniture, carving, fabric work, weaving, photographs, books, cards, herb labels and jewellery. Great gifts for Christmas and the mall shop will be of interest to the tourists over summer.

Literary awards

   Congratulations to Leona Plaisier (mentioned in my last blog), who received a Local Hero’s medal last night (27 November), along with 5 others, from the Marlborough District Council. Also congratulations to Sam Hunt, Greg O'Brien and Albert Wendt for winning the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement (worth $60,000). The awards were established in 2003 when Helen Clark was Prime Minister and recognises writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry who have made a significant contribution in these genres. This was the same year the USA invaded Iraq.
   In 2011 I went with a poet friend to hear Sam Hunt at Le Cafe in Picton. It was crowded and the audience really enjoyed the performance.  In the 1980s I lived in a house across the road from the inlet at Paremata where Sam Hunt resided in his boatshed.  I never met him though and only ever saw him giving poetry performances.

Sam Hunt

 

   A few days after the performance in Picton I was talking to someone who told me how she and her girlfriend used to fish in front of Sam Hunt’s boatshed at Paremata and she told me about all the bottles.  So I put the ideas and experience together and came up with the poem below. When I read it to a poetry group I belong to and reached line 10, one or two people admitted to being less than enthralled by the ‘familiar gravelly voice’.  Vive la difference!

 A Good Night

A crowded cafe,

impossible acoustics

chairs scraping on a tiled floor

audience fuelled by wine

merlot and a dash of lemonade

in the sav, a tall lean figure appears

he says, ‘you notice I’m wearing glasses,

first time I've seen the audience in 40 years.'

‘Steamy’, says Sam, to an expectant crowd

referring to the windows, he laughs

and recites in that familiar gravelly voice

interspersed with colourful language

F... and Shit and Christ—

the audience love it.
 

‘Where do poems come from’, he asks,

overheard snatches of conversation

lines drawn from years of experience

chance encounters, love affairs

he ends with a Hungarian lament

and three poems about Picton,

whaling, Cook Strait, and above all

friendship, we are desperate to touch him

to share a personal memory,

to connect, but we don’t get a chance

he disappears in a flash of legs

daddy-long-legs – on stilts.

But more fragile than before

thinks the girl who used to fish

in front of his boatshed at

Paremata, back then the bottles

told the story of a good night.

 

© Julie Kennedy, 2011