Helen Lehndorf

Tag: new zealand poetry

  • A new poem and an older, previously unpublished one

    Last week, a new poem I wrote, ‘hemmed in like a boar between archers’, was published on The Spinoff’s weekly column ‘The Friday Poem’.

    I’m grateful to The Spinoff and editor, Hera, for selecting the poem. It was great fun for me to see it on The Spinoff on Friday and to see what image they had selected to go with the poem.

    I wrote the poem last summer. I had a good spell with poetry over the summer and, after a while of feeling like I was wringing out a dry rag when trying to write poetry, suddenly a whole lot of poems tumbled out in a rush. It was a good (and relatively rare) feeling.

    It meant that a poetry manuscript I’ve been fiddling with for over ten years (!) is much closer to completion now.

    I was able to ditch some poems I wasn’t 100% happy with (I call them ‘the weaklings’) and replace them with some of the stronger, new ones.

    (Above: bush canopy in the Rangawahia Reserve.)

    I also wanted to share an older but previously unpublished poem.

    This was commissioned years ago for an anthology about New Zealand’s endangered species. Each poet was assigned a topic. My assigned subject was the Manoao Tree (Silver Pine).

    Sadly, the book project didn’t eventuate so I thought I’d share the poem here:

    Manoao

    Small, sensitive,
    the cleanest of the grassy greens
    of the understory
    single leader, forest pine

    too many years
    of mistaken identity
    growing in the shadow of all
    that a Kauri can be

    rainforest supporter
    prone to sudden collapse
    like all things humble,
    misidentified, or hard to see

    human desire-lines
    walk wide past
    the subtle glow
    in long rows
    of gloaming extroverts

    If we were better, we’d
    take the time
    to thread the eyes.
    of this graceful relict.

    *

  • don’t buy a sympathy card, buy this

    Another thing that happened while I was too distracted by the release of ‘A Forager’s Life’ to give it the attention it deserved is that writer Iona Winter published a grief almanac called ‘a liminal gathering‘.

    I submitted poems to it and Iona chose one for the almanac, which I share below. I feel privileged to be amongst the writers, artists, musicians and photographers who are part of this precious container for giving voice to grief.

    Iona’s son, the musician and artist Reuben Winter killed himself in 2020. Since Reuben’s death, Iona has used her skills as a writer and communicator to be public with her grief in service to all who grieve and are silenced, or are too overcome by grief to speak themselves.

    A review of the almanac by Hester Ullyart says, ‘This is a hopeful resource, much needed. A rope of stars thrown out into the murk of grief. I recommend this almanac for every shelf, for death touches us all, and no one need struggle alone.’

    I so agree. This book contains both the intensity of new grief and the wearing plod of long-carried grief. It spans anger, raw shock and emotional pain through to gratitude, reverence, elegy…sometimes in the same piece of work.

    If someone you love loses someone they love, don’t buy a sympathy card, buy them this. You will be giving them the gift of a chorus of voices who dwell in the same place as them, a liminal gathering: grief.

    In his piece in the almanac Dear Reader, Rushi Vyas captures the some of the nuance of grief in his poem’s ending:

    ‘Dear Reader, go outside. Feel everything. The wind is cruel. And full of oxygen. The sun is deadly radiation. And our only source of warmth.’

    -Rushi Vyas

    & here is my poem from the almanac:

    negotiating boundaries with the dead

    grief: week one

    kaimanawa horse in my living room

    wild waters                        white flames

    grief: week two

    flower’s fingers holding medals 

    i’m a hobo pedestaled for bravery

    grief: week three

    in the musty cave mushrooms sprout from armpits

    it’s a total eclipse of the total eclipse

    grief: week four

    hurricane chasers, race to get best footage of worst damage

    a raggedy lone wolf to stare down

    grief week five: 

    bat-infested feeling my way   with echo-location

    drink puddle-water      trying for nutrition by chewing on a husk

    grief: week six

    (but wait there’s more

    were you looking for a neat trajectory?) 

    belly-crawling at toadstool height

    make the bed with a chainsaw

    grief: week seven

    turns out the source of the tinnitus is my own throat’s moaning

    some forest fires happen to crack the open the seeds of amoured shells. But not here.

    Just another searing morning. The petrol pours itself.

  • The poem I needed right now, from Mary Walker

    The poem I needed right now, from Mary Walker

    My friend, the writer Mary Walker, recently invited her Instagram followers to request a poem for a particular mood or need. She said she would see which of her poems came forward as answering the request. Mary is a sensitive listener -of both people and the land- so I immediately took her up on the call.

    Mary’s invitation…

    I have a new book coming out next month. It’s a funny thing…publication is both a writer’s dream…and yet is not without it’s challenging elements. It can feel so strange and exposing. Each time I’ve done it I feel a very odd mix of elation and also queasiness and vulnerability. As writers we hope our offerings will be met with kindness, generosity…but once the book has gone from the writer’s mind to becoming a tangible artefact – all control is lost and the work must be let go to have a life of its own, for good or ill.

    So I asked Mary for a poem for ‘vulnerability and visibility’.

    Here is what stepped forward for me…

    Mary’s ‘Wild Fruit’

    A more perfect poem I could not imagine. I was moved to tears when I read it.

    Mary can’t know this (and yet somehow she did) but my book opens with a scene about me picking blackberries as a child…and about blackberries as a powerful edgeland plant with much to teach us about boundaries, courage and tenacity. Mary gave me just the poem I needed…at the moment I needed it. I cannot thank her enough.

    Mary’s new book is available for order now. Her poems reveal her deep enmeshment with the land and a fearless engagement with all of the challenges of being a deeply-conscious human in this world. Thank you, Mary, for this timely gift. Thank you for gifting blackberry back to me…an uncanny coincidence, a portent, and a sign…that there is magic in this world if we invite it and then listen carefully for the evidence.