The Tuesday Poem: Refeaturing Bernadette Hall and “Angelfish”
Angelfish
We’re flying over Australia.
Below us is the desert. In the desert
there’s a wound which is water
which is a tear with white salt round
the edges which is a little liquid gateway
as hard as marble should we hurtle
into it. There’s a road, a reddish snake-line
that crosses the continent that’s shaped
like an angelfish. The words are trying
to imitate the world as it imitates
itself, sand wrinkles like frozen sastrugi,
cloud shadows like black poppies
on the red ground. The brain according
to the Novel prize-winning scientist,
Gerald Edelman, is not at all like
a computer. It’s more like a rainforest
‘teeming with growth. decay, competition,
diversity and selection.’ So this word
is a toucan, this poem, a yellow
casque hornbill hiding beneath a canopy
of leaves. My brother went missing once,
in the rainforest. He was a soldier,
part of the New Zealand Army Reserve
sent to fight the Communists in Malaya.
I’ve got the headphones on now.
I’m watching Clint Eastwood’s Letters
from Iwo Jima. He was my favourite cowboy
when I was thirteen about the same time
my brother’s name was in all the papers.
I think of my brother hacking his way
through the jungle with a machete,
making it back to safety, singing ‘Figaro
Figaro, Figaro’ in the shower. He never
got on with my father who wasn’t his father.
I think of my mother and my father,
the Catholic harp, the Protestant drum,
the sad, mad, bad of Irish history:
the flogging and the being flogged,
the burning and the being burnt,
the killing with pike and hoe, sword and gun,
the starving, the evictions, the bombing.
I want to protest.
I want to take communion with them.
‘Think,’ says Edelman, ‘about the idea
that each individual’s soul is truly embodied,
rather than a spirit; precious
because it is unique in its physicality,
and consciousness, unpredictable
in its creativity, and mortal.’
I close my eyes. I dream that the dead
are angelfish drifting through
a rainforest, its green forgiveness.
.
© Bernadette Hall
published in The Lustre Jug (Victoria University Press) 2009
Angelfish is reproduced here with permission.
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Fine poems should be read and heard more than once, so I’m continuing with my series of relooking at poets who have had multiple poems featured here on “…Anything, Really” since I joined the Tuesday Poem community in June 2010. Bernadette Hall’s Angelfish was posted here on March 13, 2012 at which I had this to say:
“…Angelfish came out in the collection The Lustre Jug…I still remember the poem and a whole series of the images contained within it—the angelfish, the black poppies, the rainforest, the ‘sad, mad, bad’—quite clearly. Bernadette has a real gift for that I think: the line or indeed the whole poem that ‘sticks’ with you as reader. Although in fact I heard Angelfish first, on the radio, and remember listening to Bernie read it and thinking: “Yes. Oh, yes!”
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About Bernadette Hall:
Bernadette Hall is best known for her poetry but also writes short fiction. She has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent being ‘Life & Customs’ (Victoria University Press 2013). Also in 2013, her edition of poems by the Christchurch writer, Lorna Staveley Anker, was published by Canterbury University Press. Titled ‘The Judas Tree’ it reveals Lorna Anker as New Zealand’s first woman war poet with memories of both World Wars. The Dunedin composer Anthony Ritchie used seven of Bernadette’s Stations of the Cross poems in a symphony which premiered in Christchurch on the 22nd of February this year as a memorial to those who died and those who have suffered as a result of the 2011 earthquake.
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