after the funeral
— freeing a bee
from the spider’s web

.

(c) Helen Lowe

.

Highly Commended, NZ Poetry Society International Haiku Competition, 2009

Published in moments in the whirlwind, Ed. Barbara Strang, NZ Poetry Society anthology, 2009

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To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog—and link to other Tuesday Poets posting around NZ and the world—either click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

Tomorrow, 15 March it will be three weeks exactly since the Feburary 22nd earthquake that caused so much havoc here in Christchurch, but over this past weekend I think all our thoughts have been with Japan. In terms of reports from an (only) moderately damaged ‘burb, the difficulties of our day-to-day aftermath here are dwarfed by comparison with the (now confirmed as) Level 9 earthquake, the shocking force of the tsunami that washed across Sendai and the surrounding countryside, and the subsequent nuclear emergency at the Fukushima power plant. (In itself a compelling argument for why a country like NZ should never go down the nuclear power route.)

The magnitude of the Japanese disaster, coming so soon after the destruction here—itself not small—left me feeling emotionally numb. Intellectually I have been shocked and horrified, easily imagining how terrible the situation there will be for survivors and authorities struggling to cope, but emotionally it is almost too terrible to take in. I have been very aware, too, that there is literally nothing I can do to help, beyond to give money to the international relief effort. So over the past weekend I found myself focusing on what I could do here, however small. This included digging out the stormwater drain along the street again, a job I did exactly a week ago, but which the intervening rain had silted up again. Something, however mundane, that needed to be done—and that I could do.

The thing about being out on the street of course, is that people see you and stop to chat—usually about their own earthquake day-to-day. One elderly neighbour said that he had just felt the need to take it a bit easier lately, and I seconded that idea as I had been concerned that he was working much too hard in the immediate aftermath. Another spoke of feeling depressed, because for everything she fixed, she only seemed to uncover new damage. Her house, unfortunately, is badly damaged: the timber part of the house is visibly off its concrete foundation. Someone else was worried about her flatmate’s cat which had disappeared after the earthquake and so far not returned. For others, the job of recovery just seems too big and they feel lost, unsure where to begin every day.

You’re probably picking up here that getting the drains dug out takes a little longer than just the digging part.:) Talking and connecting with people is definitely important, but sometimes it can also be as deeply wearying as the hard physical work. I am not certain why this is, but suspect it has to do with the emotional cost that one can see people carrying. So it is important to have “time out” and recharge the batteries, in order to keep going for the long haul—and also to be practical and realistic about what you can actually do. Then do it.

Sometimes, in amongst all the darkness and disaster, it just feels incredibly important to celebrate some of the fun and/or good stuff happening. So here’s a few things going on right now:

I currently have a guest post, The Grand Symbiosis: Fantasy & History featured on the Orbit blog. (Orbit is my UK/AU/NZ publisher and The Heir of Night, of course, was released in the UK on March 3.)

March is Women’s History Month and over on Even in a little thing, Gillian Polack has been running a Women’s History guest post series, all by women writers. Some fascinating posts have already featured and I’m looking forward to what the rest of the month brings. (I have contributed a post myself and will let you know when that runs.)

Another exciting project that is on the way has been put together by SpecFicNZ core group members, Cassie Hart and Anna Caro as a fundraiser for the Christchurch earthquake. Tales for Canterbury will be “an anthology of short stories loosely themed around survival, hope and the future. All profits of this anthology will be donated to the Red Cross Earthquake Appeal, or another registered charity aimed at aiding those in need in Canterbury.” According to Cassie and Anna, the purpose of the anthology is two-fold: to help financially, but also  to provide entertainment and alleviation in a time of crisis. They hope the anthology’s words will help make a difference.

I hope so, too—and because supporting and rebuilding Christchurch after the earthquake is very important to me as a resident and a writer, I am delighted to be able to contribute a short story, The Fountain, to Tales for Canterbury.  You can go directly to the website here, read the list of contributors here, and also listen to Cassie’s interview with Lynn Freeman on Radio New Zealand’s Arts on Sunday programme.

And I can only say “kudos” to Cassie and Anna for the idea and making it happen.

No ‘quake report from Christchurch today, given the magnitude of the devastation caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, including massive aftershocks and ‘collateral’ damage such as fires and damage to the nuclear reactor at Fukushima.

The earthquake has been reported here as variously 8.4 and 8.9 magnitude, but either way it’s huge and my thoughts are with the people of Japan today and those affected by tsunami damage in other areas (although I understand this has not eventuated to the extent feared.)

Had another aftershock that ‘registered’ this evening—i.e. one of 12 so far today but this one was 4.5 and a real little shaker: Nice. (Not.)

I think I said the other day that around now, ie day 17 post quake and into week 3 (so short a time, but it feels like forever)  is where the really hard part starts. The initial adrenalin rush is over and the immediate disaster relief tasks have largely been done—in my case nothing more significant than picking up broken stuff and shovelling all that sludge, but the CD authorities are also progressively reducing the cordon around the central city. Yet the roads remain like a cross between slalom courses and old river beds, there’s still no sewer (or stormwater, fun when the winter rains come) and there’s damage to the house that could be dangerous—but the queue to get stuff done is city sized.

Partly, I know that I will normalise to the situation because survival demands it, but another part of me simply felt unreasonably angry today. I just wanted it all to stop and everything to go back to being “nice” and “normal” again. My rational mind—of course!—sneered and said, “Well, you know that’s not going to happen, not for a long, long time!” But my emotional self still felt angry and unreasonable anyway.

I realise that this is probably a perfectly normal reaction and the important thing may be to acknowledge that there is going to be (ok, is already!) an emotional reaction (apparently the extreme tiredness is another element of that) and try to be “aware”, rather than being ruled by the emotional rollercoaster.  Especially since citywide ‘earthquake rage’ is not what Christchurch needs right now: we still need every citizen to do their best to keep it together! A bit like those World War 2 posters—which does make me shake my head and wonder how the people who survived that, the civilians as well as the soldiers, managed the transition back from the extreme and prolonged stress of war to a peacetime society.

Another important step is to ‘make it normal’ as much as possible, which is why I am trying to get back into a routine with my writing and talking about fun stuff here on the blog, as I did yesterday.  So I stuck with the writing again here today and am working on my Book Month workshops as well—but basically every time I stop and look around there’s no way of avoiding the hard reality, which is that nothing’s in the least bit normal and isn’t going to be any time soon. And I just have to deal with that.

Flowers from Zireaux

There are  always bright notes though and today’s was receiving this wonderful, colourful bunch of flowers from my fellow Tuesday Poem blog poet, Zireaux.  I love the colours and it’s nice to have a spot of bright in amongst all that ‘not normal.’  So thank you, Zireaux.  🙂

I don’t know about you, but I definitely feel ready for a change of pace, at least for one day …

So on that note, what’s some of the good writing stuff that’s going down?

Firstly, I revised 27 pages of The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night, Book Two) today—which may not sound like much, but it’s a considerable advance on the 8 or so pages I managed on Monday, day-the-first of “getting back into it.” So now my goal for tomorrow is to equal or better that target … (watch this space.)

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Secondly, I am very pleased to have had two poems, Starman and Penelope Dreaming, from my Ithaca Conversations sequence, accepted by editor Mark Pirie for Broadsheet 7. I understand Broadsheet 7 will be coming out sometime in May. Mark is also the Managing Editor of Headworx Publishers and co-edited Voyagers Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (Interactive Press 2009) with Tim Jones.

Bookman Beattie ran a nice feature on Broadsheet on his Beatties Bookblog on Monday 21—you can check it out here.

Interlitq 14

You may recall that I also had another poem from the Ithaca Conversations sequence, titled One Day, published in Interlitq 14 recently, together with Australia Post.

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OK, what’s next? That’s fairly easy because finally it’s NZ Book Month (they skipped last year to shift the annual date from September/October to March.) As part of the nationwide celebrations I’ll be in Otago/Southland from March 21-26, as a guest of the Dan Davin Literary Foundation, giving a series of workshops for high school kids as well as a public lecture in Invercargill. I’m really looking forward to it and have already done a bit of work on the workshop content—all those good ideas percolating away …

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Last but not least, I’ve received—and accepted!—an invitation to attend Context, this year’s NZ National Science Fiction Fantasy Convention, to be held in Auckland over Queen’s Birthday. I was very disappointed not to be able to attend Au Contraire last year due to a longstanding family event, so I am definitely pleased to be going to Context, especially with Catherine Asaro as the International Guest of Honour. Now I just have to put my thinking cap on and come up with some panel/discussion options.

Nice, too, just to have some positives to talk about after all the earthquake reports.:)

March 8 was  International Women’s Day, but noting that was about the limits of what I felt able to do to celebrate it this year. Normally Suffrage Day, September 19, is the day the Women on Air programme, Plains 96.9 FM,  organises an event—so fingers crossed the city and the programme will be in a state to do something by that time this year. At present the Plains 96.9 FM building is still inside the central city cordon (ie the off-limits zone) so who knows when we will be back on air—or what condition the building is in. (The station manager’s latest advisory was still an “unable to even access the site to ascertain the level of damage.” That cordon the Civil Defence folk have in place is definitely serious business and to be fair, probably still needs to be at this stage.)

Yesterday, March 8, I mostly just felt tired and it was a real struggle to get anything done, even though I’ve been doing so much up until now. I suspect this may be the aftermath of the initial, post February 22 adrenaline rush kicking in. Adrenaline is good stuff and helps you get through a lot  that needs to get done—but sooner or later you have to signal ‘time out’ or pay the price. So I think I will be trying to take things a little more slowly over the next few days, despite all those things on the “still really need to make happen” list.

Getting back into the writing as of Monday definitely felt good, although just a little like dealing to the weight of Sisyphus’s boulder. That was not just because of the immense, post February 22 tiredness, but also because I had to shift my head back into a completely different space from earthquake recovery. Like the rest of the city, everything in my study pretty much got thrown everywhere by the earthquake and although I had found the annotated manuscript and my editor’s notes as a priority on the 22nd, securing it in my ‘evacuation kit’ (in the event evacuation was  required, which fortunately it wasn’t), the pages weren’t necessarily in pristine order. So getting everything back to the point it was at as of 12.51 pm on February 22nd was the essential first step. The second was dealing with the weirdness of going back to doing what I had been doing then, as  though none of the previous two weeks had happened—which engendered it’s own strange sense of dislocation.

Although as I said in Monday’s post, very much a step that needed to be taken. And despite the tiredness, one that has felt good as I slowly get back into the rhythm of the story that is The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two.

Just as I scheduled this to post, a really good, solid, 4.3 aftershock came through, with a prolonged rumble and shake up of that same study—just to remind me that it’s not over yet, not by a long chalk.

To a Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

by William Carlos Williams

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On November 2, 2010 I posted Spring and All, which is also a poem by William Carlos Williams. I said at the time that Williams is one of my favourite poets, but even so I would not normally have posted another poem of his so soon. There is a particular reason for choosing this poem, however.

In the immediate few days after the earthquake, when we had no power or other services, and were subsisting on food from a can that could be cooked over a spirit burner, a neighbour brought me fresh plums from her tree. They were great plums, but the delight of eating something fresh, with that borderline between sweet and tart that the best plums manage to achieve, reminded me strongly of this poem: they tasted good to me, in fact.

Hence my choice of To a Poor Old Woman for this week’s Tuesday Poem. (Although I’m not having having a bar of either the poor or the old, no matter the circumstances.)

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To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog—and link to other Tuesday Poets posting around NZ and the world—either click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

Tomorrow, Tuesday 8 March, it will be two weeks since the February 22 earthquake wreaked such havoc on Christchurch. And there’s still a truckload to be done, both in the city and right here on the home acre. Yesterday, after spending most of the day working through lists (believe me, these are endless—as fast as you cross one task off, another 10 spring up in its place, not unlike the heads of Hydra) and also packing away books and ornaments (so that I could consequently store away large, likely-to-fall-over items of furniture, ie shelving units) I was exhausted. Ex-haus-ted, dear readers.

Part of that exhaustion, I suspect, was emotional: I felt like a refugee in my own home. It also underlined what I have known in my head from the 22nd—that this really isn’t going to be over for a long time. But I also thought:  I still have  a manuscript to edit and two more books to write. That’s my job and despite all this other stuff that’s crying out to be done, I need to get back to it. Life amongst the ruins perhaps, but we all need to carry on.

I’ll undoubtedly still spend a great deal of time with my arm up to my shoulder in water, clearing silt from stormwater traps, plus scraping the last layers of liquefaction sludge off hard surfaces, as well as chasing EQC and insurance companies, builders and drainlayers (me and the rest of the city.) I’ll definitely keep bringing you reports from the ‘burbs for a while yet, too. But I want to start moving on—and actively returning to work, which in my case is writing, seems like the best place to start.

So that’s what I’m doing today. I’m sitting down at my desk, in amongst all those boxes of packed away stuff, and I’m working on the ms for The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two.

How about you? What are you doing, where you are?

Why This Report Is Late:

Yesterday I promised this earthquake report either late yesterday or ‘early’ today and at early afternoon it definitely ain’t early in the day… So what happened?

Firstly, the weather forecast yesterday promised rain, so as soon as I posted the book draw and launch-a-thon results I headed out, despite wind and dust, to try and clear what silt I could from the on-street drains—another 4-hour digging stint. This time I was on my own as well, which always makes the job feel a bit tougher, and needless to say I was exhausted at the end of it—but got the opportunity to head across town to a  friend’s place and do laundry, and so ‘seized the day.’ But by the time all that was done, there was no time—or, if I am honest, energy—for blog posts.

I am glad that I did the work though, because I pulled out a lot more silt as well as clearing several small “dams” caused by blown newspaper and other rubbish, and when I checked the morning (because it has been raining) the water on the street at least was flowing. This is the situation we are in now: without rain, we get the constant blowing dust and the sort of storms we got last Wednesday (when, as my brother said: ‘I saw the pictures on line and Christchurch looked like the Sahara’); with rain the dust is damped down, but with the stormwater pipes silted up presents a very real risk of surface flooding—and because of the liquefaction, subsidence as well.  Fortunately the rain has been light and intermittent, so we’ll probably be ok.

The other reason why this post is late is because we had another swarm of aftershocks yesterday and two of them were 4 pointers, 4.1 and 4.8 respectively, and on top of the baseline of existing damage, of course have done more. Power went off briefly after the 4.8 and a few more things got shaken down so there has been a little bit of tidy up to be done this morning. That is a thing I know I definitely did not appreciate prior to September 4—and now February 22 has just underlined the point—which is that an event of this kind is not just the one quake and then it’s over. There are swarms of aftershocks, some of them quite large in their own right: close to 5000 between September 4 and February 22, and another 410 approximately since then. And each aftershock of any magnitude worsens the existing damage. You get more cracks in walls, or existing cracks widen and/or lengthen, and houses that are already off their foundations get shaken a little further “off-centre.

Our Situation:

In terms of our personal situation, we are still without sewer and may yet be for some time, but we have power and tap water that is usable so long as we boil it. An update on our house as of Friday—we were visited by a council building assessment team—is that I was right to think the damage moderate, but also that there is some risk associated with our remaining chimney stack, as well as compromised bracing in one room. So both those areas will need to be addressed as soon as possible, which still leaves us somewhere far down a very long list, I imagine … But so far, it’s still weathertight and livable so we still consider (know!) ourselves to be well off compared to many.

The Trip Across Town:

The laundry run last night was the first time I have left the immediate area since February. I haven’t had a car and it’s been pretty tough getting around on foot, because of all the dust and congestion on the roads that have been open, as well as having to dodge emergency repair works everywhere—either that or get in the way of the teams doing stuff that matters, which is not “the go” in my book. Even if I had the car, the Civil Defence authorities have been asking people to stick to essential trips, so I wouldn’t have been going far anyway. But this is the first time I’ve gotten much visibility of the larger picture, with the roads buckled and mounded in many places and a large number of collapsed buildings. I knew all this anyway, from the news reports, but last night’s drive certainly brought home that the city I knew before February 22nd  is going to be in large part gone forever. It’s not just the big landmark buildings, it’s all the little street corners and pockets of character, too.

The Lyttelton Timeball Station

One major landmark building that is definitely going is the Lyttelton Timeball Station. It is a Category 1 Registered Historic Place and internationally significant because of its rarity, but has been so badly damaged by the February 22nd earthquake that it has to be demolished. The official notice on the NZ Historic Places Trust site is here.

I actually saw in the New Year for 1 January 2000, the first day of the new millenium, at the Lyttelton Timeball Station and composed this little poem on the occasion. I’ve never put it ‘out there’ before, because  the “break break break” beginning is too strong an echo of Tennyson’s poem of the same name—but at the time it was a tribute to one of the great poets of the previous millenium and “worked” in the context of a verse that I made up “on the spot” for the group of friends that I was with. I also note that the bird call and the welcome to the world of light is an element in many traditional Maori waiata.

Despite these limitations, I am still going to leave you with this poem for today, both because of its strong association with, and as my personal commemoration of, this wonderful building—but also because it speaks of hope for the future, which is something I feel we all need to look toward now in Christchurch, even as we mourn all that has been lost.

Millenium
1 January 2000

Break
Break
Break
New dawn
New day
New millennium
The weight of a thousand years
Dissolves, lifts, rolls away,
like a mist on the face
of the sea, when the sun
comes up, rejoicing.

The bird calls,
out of darkness – welcome:
welcome to the world of light.
It is the world new made,
a world made for living in,
and the bird calls
with the voice of morning:
Ka marama – it is the Dawn.
Ka awatea – it is Day.

by Helen Lowe