A Kite is a Victim

A kite is a victim you are sure of.

You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.
A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won't give up,
or the wind die down.
A kite is the last poem you've written
so you give it to the wind,
but you don't let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.
A kite is a contract of glory
that must be made with the sun,
so you make friends with the field
the river and the wind,
then you pray the whole cold night before,
under the travelling cordless moon,
to make you worthy and lyric and pure.
Journey to the Interior
by Margaret Atwood
There are similarities
I notice: that the hills
which the eyes make flat as a wall, welded
together, open as I move
to let me through; become
endless as prairies; that the trees
grow spindly, have their roots
often in swamps; that this is a poor country;
that a cliff is not known
as rough except by hand, and is
therefore inaccessible. Mostly
that travel is not the easy going

from point to point, a dotted

line on a map, location
plotted on a square surface
but that I move surrounded by a tangle
of branches, a net of air and alternate
light and dark, at all times;
that there are no destinations
apart from this.
There are differences
of course: the lack of reliable charts;
more important, the distraction of small details:
your shoe among the brambles under the chair
where it shouldnt be; lucent
white mushrooms and a paring knife
on the kitchen table; a sentence
crossing my path, sodden as a fallen log
Im sure I passed yesterday
(have l been
walking in circles again?)
but mostly the danger:
many have been here, but only
some have returned safely.
A compass is useless; also
trying to take directions
from the movements of the sun,
which are erratic;
and words here are as pointless
as calling in a vacant wilderness.
Whatever I do I must
keep my head. I know
it is easier for me to lose my way
forever here, than in other landscapes

Standardization by Alec Derwent Hope

When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;
Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop
With horror at the house not made with hands
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup
Another pure theosophist demands

Rebirth in other, less industrial stars

Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars
And celluloid and rubber are unknown;
When from his vegetable Sunday School
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool
About the "Standardization of the Race";
I see, stooping among her orchard trees,
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in,
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees,
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.
For there is no manufacturer competes
With her in the mass production of shapes and things.
Over and over she gathers and repeats
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings.
She does not tire of the pattern of a rose.
Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise.
She cannot recall how long ago she chose
The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail's long eyes,
Love, which still pours into its ancient mould
The lashing seed that grows to a man again,
From whom by the same processes unfold
Unending generations of living men.
She has standardized his ultimate needs and pains.
Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in
His dreams: his science is tethered to their brains,
His guilt merely repeats Original Sin.
And beauty standing motionless before
Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile,
A long queue in an unknown corridor,
Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.

House and land.

Wasnt this the site, asked the historian,
Of the original homestead?
Couldnt tell you, said the cowman;
I just live here, he said,
Working for old Miss Wilson
Since the old mans been dead.
Moping under the bluegums
The dog trailed his chain

From the privy as far as the fowlhouse

And back to the privy again,
Feeling the stagnant afternoon
Quicken with the smell of rain.
There sat old Miss Wilson,
With her pictures on the wall,
The baronet uncle, mothers side,
And one she called The Hall;
Taking tea from a silver pot
For fear the house might fall.
People in the colonies, she said,
Cant quite understand
Why, from Waiau to the mountains
It was all fathers land.
Shes all of eighty said the cowman,
Down at the milking-shed.
Im leaving here next winter.
Too bloody quiet, he said.
The spirit of exile, wrote the historian,
Is strong in the people still.
He reminds me rather, said Miss Wilson,
Of Harriets youngest, Will.
The cowman, home from the shed, went drinking
With the rabbiter home from the hill.
The sensitive norwest afternoon
Collapsed, and the rain came;
The dog crept into his barrel
Looking lost and lame.
But you cant attribute to either
Awareness of what great gloom
Stands in a land of settlers
With never a soul at home.
Africa
Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings

On the banks of the distant river

I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veins
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is unbent
This back that never breaks under the weight of humilation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying no to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree, young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
springing up patiently, obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.
The Missing link
I will remember then
the great river that turned, turning
with the fire of the first sun,
away from the old land of red robed men
and poisonous ritual,
when the seven brothers fled south
disturbing the hornbills in their summer nests.
Remember the flying dust
and the wind like a long echo
snapping the flight of the river beetle,
venomous in the caves
where men and women dwelt facing the night
guarding the hooded poison.
There are no records.
The river was the green and white vein of our lives

linking new terrain,

in a lust for land brother and brother
claiming the sunrise and the sunset,
in a dispute settled by the rocks
engraved in a vanished land.
I will remember then the fading voices
of deaf women framing the root of light
in the first stories to the children of the tribe.
Remember the river's voice:
Where else could we be born
where else could we belong
if not of memory
divining life and form out of silence.
Water and mist,
the twin gods, water and mist,
and the cloud woman always calling
from the sanctuary of the gorge
Remember, because nothing is ended
but it is changed.
And memory is a changing shape
showing with these fading possessions
in lands beyond the great ocean
that all is changed but not ended.
And in the villages the silent hill men still await
the long promised letters, and the meaning of words.
Of Mothers Among Other Things by A. K. Ramanujan
I smell upon this twisted

blackbone tree the silk and white

petal of my mother's youth.
From her ear-rings three diamonds
splash a handful of needles,

and I see my mother run back

from rain to the crying cradles
The rains tack and sew
with broken thread the rags
of the tree-tasselled light.

10

But her hands are a wet eagle's

two black pink-crinkled feet,

one talon crippled in a gardentrap set for a mouse. Her saris

do not cling: they hang, loose

15

feather of a onetime wing.

My cold parchment tongue licks bark
in the mouth when I see her four
still sensible fingers slowly flex
to pick a grain of rice from the kitchen floor.

20

TO THE CHINESE RESTAURANT

for Daisy
We come in here from the long afternoon
stretched over the towns sloping roofs,
its greasy garages and ice-cream parlours,
its melancholic second-hand bookshops
with their many missing pages.
Lifes not moving.
We sit at a red table, among the dragons,
near the curtained-off street-facing windows
with their months old orangeade.
Out in the streets there are schoolboys with
their ties askew and the garish fruit-sellers.
We eat more than we need to. We eat
so that our boredoms no longer dangerous,
so that from the comfort of soup,
with the minor pleasures of chopsuey,
we can fend off the memory of cities unvisited,
unknown and unknowable affairs,
people with never-fading lipstick and
confident gestures who we will never be.
One day soon well be running,
our lives will be like the blur seen from a bus,
and we wont read each others letters thrice.
But right there were young, we count

our money carefully, we laugh so hard

and drop our forks.
We are plucked from sadness there
in that little plastic place with the lights
turned low, the waiters stoned from doing nothing,
the smells of ketchup and eternally frying onions.
Modern Slavery
Benjamin Zephaniah
Who says where who say when
who says stop to start again
who dictates where to go
moves you round to and fro,
you might work ina factory
de unemployed will never free
de situation look to me just like slavery,
modern slavery it mek you militant
modern slavery it mek you rave and rant
modern slavery you do not need tuition
to learn dad dis slave driving is done by television,
fight it bravely, modern slavery.
Every time you sign at the dole office
dem tax us and tek de money pay fe rockets
we pay fe wars their civilization is hig
some house have fifty bedrooms
some house is like pig sty,
and they have many millions and they give us
a share, health workers will riot to keep welfare,
and in high court de circle is complete,
de judge is a rapist and de jury is asleep,
you want to shout for justice but you cannot advertise,
starving faces on a poster don't make you any wise
to cover up hypocrisy they setting up a charity
they'll make a documentary, modern slavery,
slavery here we go again modern slavery

I want to see an end to modern slavery

hear it every time, sellout on de radio, check it out
here we go slavery, fight it fight it bravely.
Well if you try to fight it like Nicaragua dem say
you have a contact in Russia,
America have contact wid de Mafia but dem kill you
if you talk wid Cuba, see,
freedom of speech is a burning illusion and as
you work you die from pollution,
what I want see is a free Chile, until den I fight bravely.
Who says where who says when
who say stop to start again
who dictates where to go
moves you around to and fro,
some might slave in a factory
de unemployed are never free
dis is de documentary called
modern slavery.