SLV

An extra poem today, because since I first mentioned on Facebook that I wrote a hip-hop poem about the State Library of Victoria, people keep asking to see it. It's a bit of fun. Here you go then (swears warning):

If I was feeling lucky/I wouldn’t test it by clicking buttons/I’m a glutton

I’ve ogled enough rainbow logos to know/when I have to slow that shit down to a glacier

If I can’t face ya/ what does that say about your place in this space, huh?

Wherever we go I’m fuckin keyword searchin/perchin/ up like a librarian workin

High up in the dome of the SLV/you’ve got nothing to see but the books and crooks and the shit-hot MC

Invisible crews are pourin the brews and servin the stews of alphabet soup to the students

they stream in/creamin each other with words/ running in herds/there aren’t any birds

in the rafters/just new pages/guaranteed wages and laughter.

Graf

(based on suggestions from @ernmalleyscat and @matchtrick)

track future photos

edit roadworks

rickroll cars out

nick sharpies black fast

every thing climbs

so dig rocks up

rap it up rabbit outside

old factories at smoko time

arrive past bad coffee

dabble in funeral bells

grow bricks into a dam

right, be back after rain

always slick markers in my

felted left hand

icarus was a lighter

to anyone’s cigarette:

Texta sternly

Ink it quick

Mark it firmly

___________________________________________

Today's poem is also - you guessed it - an acrostic, so read down the side, yeah? The line about 'funeral bells' is a play on 'Belgrave' (because I like cryptic crossword clues).

Based on suggestions/challenges from two peeps:

• @ernmalleyscat: "smoko"

And this exchange:

• @annaryanpunch: "@timsterne @pinknantucket There's actually a Ternes road in Upwey that I contemplated amending for you in sharpie and taking a photo of."
• @matchtrick: "@annaryanpunch @timsterne @pinknantucket I may well do that now you've prompted me."
• @annaryanpunch: "@matchtrick @timsterne @pinknantucket NEXT BLOG"
• @matchtrick: "@annaryanpunch @timsterne @pinknantucket NEXT POEM"

Formed around a library

(based on suggestions from @GretasTardis, @ernmalleyscat and @matchtrick)

To be sung to the tune of 'South Australia'

Round a library I took form,

Find a book, read a book,

From its pages I was torn,

Formed around a library.

All the words you’d ever need,

Find a book, read a book,

Words to fill that lyric greed,

Formed around a library.

Words for everything that moves,

Find a book, read a book,

Spider monkeys, ballet shoes,

Formed around a library.

Junior fiction was my land,

Find a book, read a book,

Secrets bound into my hand,

Formed around a library.

All the taunts around my head,

Find a book, read a book,

Disappeared with pages read,

Formed around a library.

Deaf to all reactive jeers,

Find a book, read a book,

Paper snakes don’t prompt my tears,

Formed around a library.

Curled around your rolling shelves,

Find a book, read a book,

Lines that showed us to ourselves,

Formed around a library.

Though I’m grown I keep the place,

Find a book, read a book,

Hold the words that shaped my face,

Formed around a library.

___________________________________________________________

This poem is based on suggestions from three peeps:

• @ernmalleyscat: "Collecting thoughts for poem? How about people's varying reactions to snakes?" (this is only *sort of* in the poem, as it was almost impossible to work in. Hope you can find it.)
• @GretasTARDIS: "spider monkeys! Weddings! Ballet shoes! Or all three!" (All three, just for you)
• @matchtrick: "In terms of form, I should like something in the form of a sea-shanty or ye olde ballade please."

I have an unabashed love of folk songs and sea shanties. My family sing these sorts of things at every party, and all our family bands have been folk bands (that's my uncle in the hat). This poem is based on the sea shanty South Australia. But as soon as I read 'sea shanty' I especially thought of Tolly in An Enemy at Green Knowe singing a shanty (at the volume they always should be sung - LOUD) from a tree as his friend Ping sings back Chinese songs from his homeland. They are completely different boys, brought together by place and time and singing. Aren't we all? It's gorgeous passage actually, I will quote it in full:

" 'Doing the garden' meant going all round, following every path, showing each other exactly where every single thing had happened, swarming over the fallen tree that had been Hanno's bridge across the moat, climbing all the trees, looking at Green Knowe from every possible vantage point and loving it every minute. As Ping was forest-born he was able to compete on equal terms with Tolly, who knew all the trees and holds. If Tolly swung in the top fork of a giant beech tree from which he got the best view of Green Knowe as a Norman building, singing sea shanties at the top of his voice, Ping in a tall pear tree in the orchard from which he could see the circle of the moat and the course of the river, answered with strange and distant Chinese songs. In this duet all the birds joined with enthusiasm. They were at home."

Displaced children in a strange place, but through music and friendship: 'they were at home'. This is why I love these books deeply. So when 'sea shanty' was popped up first in my timeline, I was sold. It made me think immediately of Tolly and Ping (and hunt through pages to find the passage), and reminded me how I first discovered Lucy Boston's Green Knowe series in the junior fiction section of the Warrnambool library. Those books led me, 15 years later, to visit Lucy's Norman manor on my honeymoon, an afternoon I have blogged about but almost can't explain the importance of. Four hundred years ago, a baby went to sleep.

Libraries are important.

I was formed around a library, as a child, as a teenager, as a reader, as an adult, and as a librarian.

Sheep for money

(based on suggestions from - deep breath - @sulphura, @MJPhotographer, @skippy_2, @jellyjellyfish, @GretasTARDIS, @tiggyjohnson and @xutraa)

A never-played symphony of hot days

skipped over summer this year. Left the

paddling pool withered in the shed,

dashed over in tights and boots.

We bake safely under the waves to dry

our flooded heads. Churn out secret biscuits,

hidden pancakes and congenial puffed muffins

under the watchful pearl eye of the

whiskey bottle. Coiled in an empty glass

is the most perfect green snake.

Jobs waver and glow like kelp underwater

swirling ocean night lights in the mind.

I’ll run away to work in Britain?

Workers there don’t fleece the welcome mat don’t

roll cocks back and forth like cigars don’t

pretend that sort of dried shit is merchandise

to feed a universal pet hate.

I’ve written it out loud - I’m not a sheep; I can’t.

Can’t do this/clean up/smile/earn/go

back for one more day. Sorry again.

But tiny riders saddle up, short horses sing back.

Wolves of our minds howl out

hungry for their silly bag of meat,

rake miniature famine down our backs

and plead for mercy. Where is our summer?

Will we forgive us ourselves?

Who will take the next order?

_________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on requests from seven peeps (SEVEN!):

• @sulphura: "How about an Ode to the Summer that Never Was?"
• @MJPhotographer: "sheep....(joking) how about swirling night lights" (I put the sheep in too)
• @skippy_2: "The pearl eye of the most perfect green snake."
• @jellyjellyfish: "Guilt. Redemption. Tiny horses"
• @tiggyjohnson: "muffins!"
• @GretasTARDIS: "pancakes! Britain!"
• @xutraa: "Whiskey, welcome mats and BULL PEN…s" (I believe this is the first bull penis I've put into a poem)

This poem (believe it or not, I know it's a bit odd) is also about doing the hard stuff we have to do to keep going. Changing ourselves and our thoughts for the better, doing things we don't want to do - whether for money or love or family or obligation or just to assuage the guilt that comes from being a human out in the world with other humans.

Hiraeth

"Hiraeth is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. Attempts to define it [describe it as] homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, and the earnest desire for the Wales of the past."

(based on suggestions from @snazzydee and @realnixwilliams)

No one had heard of feta or sushi.

My family boiled the day in a pot

I listened hard, today I just hear rice

packed soggy 'chow mein' with

saturated pineapple chunks in

And three-bean salad from

a farty tin. Everyone’s aunt

was named after someone from

A Country Practice.

At thirteen, we cemented

her poem by heart. I researched:

Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu,

ac y mae’r arglwyddes yn dod.

We brought mountains, sang

this uncommon rising language

in our different accents.

Looked up the double L.

We had mad Welsh knowledge:

A girl, white as rice,

A girl, brown as rivers.

I craved your home's scent, your

easy spiced community.

Struck by Susan Cooper:

iron for our birthdays, bronze carried long

In Nouvelle Calédonie I was

‘la grande blanche’ to my new family:

The big white one; tall and icy.

Three from the circle, three from the track.

I was never la grande blanche

in your house. Sure I was an oddity,

but placed carefully, sistered and mothered.

Fire in the candle ring, water from the thaw.

At thirteen, I had sudden siblings,

infuriating and full of eyebrows.

I can grieve us clearly, I am homesick

for sonic giggles and loud confidence,

nostalgia for the brilliance of our limbs.

We are mothers now and not forgotten:

taller than mountains of children.

What of our bronze babies carried long?

Come here, rice women. We desire singing,

trace silver marks on the tree.

_________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from two peeps:

• @snazzydee: In honour of St David's day yesterday, I nominate this http://bit.ly/i3ahZN (a link to the definition of Hiraeth. I'm saying this for my mother who is internetless, so I have to print out my blog and post it to her).
• @realnixwilliams: Eating delicious food!

Hiraeth is pronounced like this, which sounds a bit like 'here rice' to me, hence my need to include the phrases 'hear rice' and 'here, rice' in the poem. Nerd.

When we were 13, my friend and I read Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence at the same time and adored it (we still adore it). The photo for this post is of my copies of the books (can't find The Grey King! Where isit!). My friend and I both knew the poem off by heart, though I think I was a bit more obsessive because I looked up Welsh pronunciations because it had to be right. She and her family were part of an easy, wide Sri Lankan community in our town that I longed to be part of, big white sensitive doofus that I was/am. And I was a part of it, in a way. Belonging can be colourless.

This poem is what grew up this morning when I thought about hiraeth - my earnest homesickness for community, and the way that strangely enough: Wales is a part of it.

Sand it back

(based on suggestions from @twitofalili, @matchtrick, @anitranot channeled by @TheEndeavour, and most importantly @ernmalleyscat)

We stuck to our inheritance like flypaper.

You, big pigtails; the brat fury genius.

Me, little shoulders; the red hot scientist.

Our new/old home is slender, likes flowers.

House, how do you like your blue-eyed boy,

your sweet-limbed girl? We are grown: up.

Thirty years & well more thirty centimetres

We are drawn to this picket fence to parry,

dodge ourselves & fuse like double-sided tape.

The same argument, this time we stick it

like a gymnast. Take the paint off, sand it back

to bare solar systems of earth & crust.

Solid siblings pause: our arms. Are still.

We have ground back the years

to stand. Eyes lick the door frame.

Our heights, ground pencil against the grain,

the space of our years is a well-kerned paragraph.

Me & you; sister & brother; X & Y.

Once briefly the same height,

for a month we shared an ampersand.

_____________________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from four peeps:

• @twitofalili: "Ampersands and double-sided stickytape!"
• @matchtrick: "The Solar System. Hot scientists. e e cummings"
• @anitranot, channeled via @TheEndeavour: "if you get the word 'kerning' in, @anitranot would be very impressed."

And finally, this very special suggestion from @ernmalleyscat, who has had the idea head-floating for 10 years but never put it into writing, and so has given it to me. I am a bit honoured as it is lovely. I hope I have done it justice:

• @ernmalleyscat: "Renovating the house you grew up in and finding pencil height marks under layers of paint on door jambs."

Lines 1 and 2 of the second stanza are taken from two of my favourite e.e. cummings poems, Suppose and Buffalo Bill.

Kerning is the process of adjusting the space between characters, usually to make it visually pleasing. A well-kerned sentence looks nice. It's relative to the character pairs in the word, because every letter has different slopes and takes up a different amount of space (Capital I vs. capital V for example). Have a look at the Wikipedia picture as it's easier than me explaining in too many words. A picture is worth a thousand proverbials. A pretty girl who naked is is worth a million statues*

*that's e. e. cummings again.

Laundry date

(based on suggestions from @eglantinescake and @SeanMElliott)

Stuck between a rut and a fresh place

Crush embarrassed water between fists

I've never lost a stain, I can bash

Every damp sock clean like fish on a rock

No one can answer every girl correctly

Can rinse down planets for her or

Extract powdered star granules

Retract nerves on the spin cycle and

Obey rules of romantic thermodynamics

Maybe on first listen, everyone

Asks the same soggy questions. But

No load is the same, no atom spins its

Course to clothesline soaked and alone

Every smooth sheet is a wet dream

____________________________________________

Today's poem is based on suggestions from two peeps:

• @eglantinescake: "I want you to write a poem about laundry."
• @SeanMElliott: "Science speed dating?"

Today's poem didn't go where I intended. After Penni's suggestion, I was intending a gentle, cool poem about the soothing aspects of doing the washing (I find it soothing, anyway, especially hanging it out). But when science speed dating was added into the mix, a kind of frustration crept into the words (I also find doing the laundry frustrating. DOONA COVERS are so unwieldy, argh). It's odd when words won't behave themselves for you.

Also, today's poem is another acrostic. Not that I'm obsessed by acrostics or anything.