Tuesday Poetry: Two Short Poems by Bernadette Hall

At Scorching Bay, Wellington

running the ‘I-loves’
like kites along the shoreline
where the gulls startle
and rise
the sky shrinking
the clouds moving faster
than anything

Three Wishes

one of us can be the man who rides a Parthenon horse
one can be the woman who runs across the ice at night like a silver fox
one can take her painted heart out of its beautiful hand-crafted box
……………….and set it up in a window in the main street of Port Chalmers

—

Today I continue my look at poems that, broadly speaking, address the “sea”, and am very pleased to bring you two short poems from Bernadette Hall.

About The Poet:

Bernadette Hall is best known for her poetry but also writes short fiction. She is recognised as one of New Zealand’s more distinctive poetic voices and received the highly prestigious Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2015.

Bernadette has also been an Artists in Antarctica Fellow in 2004, the 2006 Victoria University Writer in Residence, and in 2007 held the Rathcoola Residency in Donoughmore, Ireland. Bernadette’s 2009 collection, The Lustre Jug, (Victoria University Press), was a finalist for the 2010 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry.

To date, she has published eleven collections of poetry, the most recent being ‘Maukatere, floating mountain’ with artwork by Rachel O’Neill (Seraph Press, 2016).

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 22^ndof February 2014 as a memorial to those who died and those who have suffered as a result of the February 22nd, 2011 earthquake.