{"id":13758,"date":"2012-05-22T06:30:43","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T18:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=13758"},"modified":"2012-05-21T22:11:28","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T10:11:28","slug":"tuesday-poem-the-longest-day-of-the-year-by-michael-harlow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2012\/05\/22\/tuesday-poem-the-longest-day-of-the-year-by-michael-harlow\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Poem: “The Longest Day of the Year” by Michael Harlow"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR<\/p>\n

One word one word and then another,
\none word and another, waiting for the
\nlight to come stealing in, you ask what
\nis it that love dares the self to do?<\/p>\n

All he wanted was to put his shoes out
\nin the moonlight.\u00a0 To hear music be the
\nsaint of laughter again.\u00a0 And all that
\ntime rehearsing his lines in the dark;<\/p>\n

the love-mess of it all \u2013 when so much
\nforgetting is always about remembering;
\non the long walk backwards to meet
\nhimself coming the other way, but didn’t<\/p>\n

It’s just that I’m made of clouds, he said,
\nso many of my words have lost their
\nhappiness. That endless dream of being
\nawake forever and there is no one there<\/p>\n

How the longest day of the year keeps
\ngetting shorter.\u00a0 And I am too much alone;
\nif you love me will I love you too, will you?
\nIt seemed to matter that there was no
\nmarvellous music anymore:\u00a0 all that he<\/p>\n

could hear one word one word and then
\nanother, waiting for the light to come
\nstealing in, all that he could hear was
\nhow he lives in the buried talk of others;
\ninside the long history of goodbye<\/p>\n

(c) Michael Harlow<\/p>\n

~ published in “The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap”<\/strong> (Auckland University Press) 2009<\/p>\n

Reproduced here with permission<\/p>\n

.
\n\u2014<\/p>\n

About the Poem (& the Collection):<\/strong> The Poet\u2019s Note\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>“Poems that ask what it means, in the face of the absurdities and shadowy things thrown up by life, to \u2018risk delight\u2019; and what that might mean when we are looking-out and listening-in for a language to say something about how mysterious we are to ourselves and to the world<\/p>\n

Poems that are lyric moments of recognition of what happens when we stand up and speak in front of ourselves and others; you could say a way of \u2018being restoried\u2019; a way of letting \u2018words dream again\u2019, so that making the \u2018invisible, visible\u2019 is at the heart of what the I call the \u2018persistent imaginal\u2019.\u00a0 From this \u2018the poem springs\u2019<\/p>\n

And there are poems that come calling on and celebrate the \u2018privilege of ordinary astonishments\u2019–so that one day \u2018a single original carrot shall be pregnant with revolution\u2019 (an echo from the painter C\u00e9zanne)<\/p>\n

Poems that acknowledge and reflect on how it is always that the \u2018light lies down with the dark\u2019, however various the shuffling \u00a0weathers of the heart turn up loss and death, time and memory, despair and delight; when ‘forgetting is always about\u00a0 remembering’<\/p>\n

And on those occasions that poems return to that inevitable and archetypal myst\u00e9rion, what is it \u2018that love dares the self to do\u2019?<\/p>\n

A poetry that rests on and enacts the belief that we need to \u2018see the sounds and hear the words\u2019, so that despite every dark thing there is in the world, there will always be music, when \u2018words sing\u2019 poetry makes intimate everything that it touches ( there is always the distinct possibility of romance’, and more); naturally, poetry wants to go to the heart of the matter.<\/p>\n

Michael Harlow”<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

About the Poet:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Michael Harlow<\/strong> was born in the USA in 1937 to a Greek father and American\u2013Ukrainian mother. He travelled extensively in Europe and lived in several other countries before arriving in New Zealand in 1968, where he has lived ever since. In 2009, Michael Harlow was the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago and the inaugural Casselberg House Artist in Residence. “The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap”<\/em> was a finalist in the 2010 NZ Post Poetry Award.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR One word one word and then another, one word and another, waiting for the light to come stealing in, you ask what is it that love dares the self to do? All he wanted was to put his shoes out in the moonlight.\u00a0 To hear music be the saint […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13758"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13768,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13758\/revisions\/13768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}