Sky Land Sea

The local newspaper treats its readers to a one-day-a-week poetry column. Send in your contribution, have it evaluated by the South Island's favourite son, Brian Turner, and you may get published.

Ha! Is it any wonder that most of what sneaks by appear to be clones.

Anyway, the selection criteria take up at least 50% of the available space:

Footnote: Contributions to this column are invited from writers south of the Waitaki River. They should not exceed 35 lines, and they should be typed or emailed in clear text; do not send as an attachment. They may be posted to: Opinion Page, Editorial Department, Otago Daily Times, P.O. Box 181, Dunedin; or emailed to: bryan.james@odt.co.nz. No new correspondence will be entered into, and contributions, which must include a residential address and contact telephone number, will not be returned to senders. Those whose works are selected will be paid a small fee. Monday's poem is published weekly.

. . . takes a deep breath! Talk about overkill. I had the thought of taking a pair of scissors to the footnote, and rearranging the bits to produce a masterpiece of reconstructed text, but there are better things to do. And I don't write haiku on demand or by a template.

I must, however, admit to having had a go (and hence the bitterness). Not considering myself a poet, and not expecting my haiku to be thought of as poems - why else are they largely categorized as juvenile literature? - I did some reconstruction, but using my own word strings.

Herewith my 'poem', being a selection of the haiku that were spawned in the course of a month-long trek that I made down the South Island in Jandals.

Sky Land Sea

Black
an anonymous gate
just the name
landscape
aquiver and curled
at the edge she sits
at the isthmus absorbed
in a book

Mount Patriarch
lets me know where
I am, who I am
looking at land the mountains
cloud over
continuous trill the bird
flutters higher and higher
approaching the pass the wind
rocks a bee on the road
over the top
a light rain

all-day gale the grass
hisses deeper from stocktrucks
long-dead
its scream pains my eye
side of the road
bottles a dozen . . .
and counting that
sharp sun
I stoop at the edge for
sunglasses darts
at my shadow a skink

thousand mile walk
the scene that they snap - Instamatic
cork, cage, foil,
I piece together some one's picnic
a stirring of air stirs
the pond stirs
the sky

the Southern Cross
is lost . . . so many stars!
coughs in the dark
just old men and sheep
departing
arriving
momentous

Well then. At 45 lines long it's too long I suppose. But I had collapsed it into 27 before asking Brian to cast his eye. Still, I like it better this way. Follow my own rules and preferences, what!?

And if it ain't to your liking, hang on, where's those scissors?