Mary Cresswell


LINES OCCASIONED BY A 
LINE BY NORMAN MacCAIG

My thoughts fly up before my eyes
a flock of monarch butterflies
(madly orange, if you please,
born in the nineteen-seventies).
I have no real cause to show
why dusty flights should please me so,
no overwhelming soul-linked vision,
no need for chart or syllogism.

They flutter here, they flutter yon,
they do not let me brood upon
why my wit creeps at fifteen per,
slower than a philosopher*
who’d willy-nilly raise a stink
to explicate how insects think.


*Line from ‘Rag and Bone’
 


THE LADY UPSTAIRS

She rises in the sunshine. There she goes*
hell for leather in her customary way
How it came about nobody knows

It’s not for you and me to try to say
what sort of wisdom or common sense it shows
going hell for leather in a different way

They’ve polished up her legend ‘til it glows
told the kids to look the other way
find their own damn sunshine to expose

the reasons hell just hasn’t up and froze
because of what the neighbours have to say.


*Line from Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘The Rites for Cousin Vit’



SPELL AGAINST GLOOM AND DOOM

The melancholy year is dead with rain*
The seagulls swoop in ever-decreasing curves
The pounding waves are getting on my nerves
New software has buggered up my brain.

All last year was nothing much, I know,
Lock up – lock down – lock sideways if you can.
Every new attempt became an also-ran.
New ideas had no place to go.

But 2023’s a box of fluffy birds
that’s barely shown us all its baby face.
2022 can’t possibly come back again.

I hope I’ll never have to eat my words,
that this year will also vanish without trace.
The melancholy year is dead with rain.


*Line from Trumbull Stickney, ‘The Melancholy Year’

Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. Recent books: Fish Stories: Ghazals and glosas (Canterbury University Press) and Body Politic: Poems for nature in crisis (The Cuba Press). See also: | Read NZ (read-nz.org)

 
 

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