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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 37, No. 17. July 17, 1974

Diffusion

page 7

Diffusion

Chameleon
Sometimes I am the thing itself
with tail and two horns
and sometimes Christ
who covers me
and wounds my back with thorn.
Today it is the man in me
that writhes and writhes and will not
cease:
tomorrow it may be the child
tomorrow it may be the child
who crying finds relief.

—Brian King

The Young New Zealand Poet
The Young New Zealand poet sits
without hardly moving:
smiles,
blinks twice
and carves another line upon his chest.
His lover agent
names his price—
I like it
yes,
I like it yes:
I've always thought that red was best.

—Brian King

J'accuse
Don't come around me with your shrinking eye—love cannot
will not
be contained,
not by you nor any human hand:
in fingers of hollow
that dry and crack and bend.

—Brian King

Massey's Memorial
Dimmer to us now, the studio portrait
of a dozen slanted history books:
the head turned to two-thirds profile,
the thick neck and bulging temples.

The full-moon cheeks, the ridiculous droop
of the moustache attached like a mop
to the ruddy farmer's face...Snapped
With George V, snapped also Addressing troops.

Neither the best nor the worst of Prime Ministers,
a man much like the rest of us
with equal capacity for good and ill,
hardly a martyr, not saviour material.

II
Thirteen drab years we had him, breaking strikes
with a "cold, hard....bigotry"; his ironic master-stroke,
suggesting doubled hours might up the average wage.
He brought us through the War to the Aspirin Age,

Our headache: one in sixty of the population died;
imperial, he wept in the unspeakable wards.
Some thought of Specials on blood-spattered horses
and openly laughed as he went to pieces.

In those months while he expired in office, sore,
irascible, he dreamed a Russian wolf at the door,
reserves milked dry, families dining on the family cat,
looters, looters, taking his fat towns apart.

III
For Savage, yes. I grant you,
for our benignant, cancerous Little Father—
as though Huey Long fed the rabble tripe,
his jackboots concealed under pinstripes—

For Savage the weeping and the funeral train,
the shrine. But an obstinate Orangeman
moved the country to a febrile spending spree
that had had him, living, burnt in effigy...

Who could accept that dirty ruse
of politicians, or excuse
their playing the fool with his death,
forging a nation with shibboleths?

IV
For one like him, "unimaginative as a clam",
the tomb's fake Greek confection is a sham;
its pile of native marble, overly embellished,
weighs heavy on the heart of our holy relic.

Past the jail, above the bay, worth a million dollars.
Farmer Bill is straining at his celluloid collar:
pining for his post at the garden gate
of Torydom—to be vetting the candidates,

Spraying for "Bolshevism" as for fruit-fly,
killing the patients with remedies...
Until his farmers pour down from the hills like sheep,
with cudgels to help the hungry poor to sleep.

—Rhys Pasley, (first published in "Waterfront Worker")

Drawing of an tall and thin man reading a book with a bird on his head

Heaven Revisted
the angel,
thick with Max Factor
and nine-to-five grime
puts out her fortieth Cameo
and signs my card agin

her eyes don't click
when she looks at me
same jersy, same hair
same spotty face
same card the male nurse eyes
the surgeon who removed
the cyst from his hand

they ask if I've been before
resigned to anonymity.
I give the doctor
my crushed finger,

—Samuel Wind

Dropping In
A poet is like
a pigeon
lifting into the sky
dropping in on sacred places
causing some embarrassed faces.
People feed the pigeons
but how begrudgingly
they feed their poets.
They call their poems 'shit'.

Hug me Diane
Kiss me Diane
Thrill me Diane
Bill me Diane

Humour
She is pretty
and reputedly promiscuous.
He is witty and humorous
He sees the humour in rumour
but she sees none.
Alas, the affair is done
But while she regrets
he will move on
until there's a rumour
concerning his humour
that humour lets him do wrong
too often and too long
with a laugh in his sting
and a song.

by Don Colebrook Jnr

They are going away, those who harboured the day
Why did I slay
to waste my thoughts
on wrought
iron?

Madam!
Pull in your thoughts!
They bulge obscenely over your brow.
Were you not instructed how (by your mother)
to hind unseemly fats
—shape them in unnatural forms.
Natural Beauty
is Obscenity

So thoughts are
Corseted in Blank Faces

Where is your mind?
Where your hand—
your body—
where have you gone?

Madam, do you know regret?
Your thighs ache from the
love they have borne
Screaming
from a Silent World
Sit still on your padded chair
The caresses of love
have tangled your hair
in a love knot
caught his hands.

Madam, know you of loneliness?
That which neither is
nor is not.
Iron wrought Butterfly
where is his mind
you cry
crushed between the world
and his force
once
you had love, now
where is his body

Butterfly artwork

Where has he gone?

Between the essence of existence and the essence
of destruction he waits in shadows longed by
the failing light of darkness

Hidden in the blinding light too dark to see
too widespread to touch the edge of your cell
sealed in eternity destroyed by impermanence.

There are times I try to hide away your gentle rain
Listen to the lovesongs sung so often
so often they have spoke of two as one
two as one, and heartbreaks caused for both
For both would sing and harmonise their life

You yawn; stretch your tangled body
across the tress growing
in your carpet
Skip a stone across the break surf
No one in the Street
will know.

—Lynn Peck