Quick and dirty this week. Unedited and definitely improvable, but hey, it's mid-way through December and the fact I'm posting at all is a miracle!
Streets
Growing up on hard luck street
where the streets are paved with
broken glass and fences
bloom in place of trees.
Windows stare vacantly
at Cortinas rolling past
aching with arthritic
rust and mufflers emitting
smoker’s coughs.
Hope springs eternal
but hope is informed by
little more than the
detritus of junk mail and
the golden dreams of
fast meals fancy wrapped in
marketed dreams.
Is this is a place where
only weeds resist poison?
Are we to believe that
no Kauri will ever grow,
no Kahikatea brush
the skyline?
In a small sheltered corner
nurtured by a secret gardener
a sapling grows.
More poets exploring their neighbourhood here
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5 comments:
I enjoyed reading this, it sounds like a lot of places I know. I really like the hope in the sapling at the end.
Hope in places that seem to know only despair. Very lovely poem.
I love the unexpected upswing at the end - and those lines are so simply and beautifully put.
A nice read. I was very impressed near Wellington airport the other day to see the sign declaring Miramar peninsula possum free. My sister tells me she now has tuis in her garden. Maybe one day there will be a kauri tree nearby.
The ending is so perfectly constructed
In a small sheltered corner
nurtured by a secret gardener
a sapling grows.
The repeated use of the s and the g (and the also gutteral c) and the "imperfect" rhyme with corner and gardener--all of this really sets these three lines off from the rest of the poem. It creates a "sheltered corner," literally! That is fantastic!
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