Last night I attended a session of the Faces of Hunger Film Festival 2020 and have to share with you this beautiful visual poem by Alberto Zuniga… “a plate of food is a survivor, a traveler, a passport, an ambassador, an inheritance”. I hope it brings back the flavour of something your Nana used to make and the memory of the taste of childhood. “We eat what we are, what we have been, what we will be”
Tag Archive: poem
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
James Baldwin – Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems
It’s me that visits. Words that are both brand new and utterly familiar at the same time somehow. I think that’s what truth sounds like. #visit #toro #adventwords2019
Before I get into sleep with you
I want to have been
into wakefulness, too.
Janet Frame
Dunedin #NZWOMANPOETS
I have sunk myself into the world of nothingness
It is here that I move on the whisper of the wind
I have sunk myself into the colour of nothingness
The call of the morepork travelling the ocean
The sound for telling the sun’s first strike at the sea
I fly the world of nothingness
Carried in silence on wings fashioned by the breath of the beginning
I began in the world of nothingness
The world before dawn within the consciousness of
knowing the first child hei tiki
I return to the world of nothingness
Before the beginning
Before the electricity of life that pricks my fingers
With memory
Marino Blank
Taumaranui #NZWOMANPOETS
There are times in life
when we are called to be bridges,
not a great monument spanning a distance
and carrying loads of heavy traffic
but a simple bridge
to help one person from here to there
over some difficulty
such as pain, fear, grief, loneliness,
a bridge which opens the way
for ongoing journey.
When I become a bridge for another,
I bring upon myself a blessing, for I escape
from the small prison of self
and exist for a wider world,
breaking out to be a larger being
who can enter another’s pain
and rejoice in another’s triumph.
I know of only one greater blessing
in this life, and that is
to allow someone else
to be a bridge for me.
Joy Cowley
Featherston, Wairarapa #NZWOMANPOETS
In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted
And each morning we tried who should reach the
butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said: “Do not eat the poor
butterfly.”
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing.
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of our plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother’s lap.
Katherine Mansfield
Wellington #NZWOMANPOETS
If you love me
Bring me flowers
Wild daisies
Clutched in your fist
Like a torch
No orchids or roses
Or carnations
No florist’s bow
Just daisies
Steal them
Risk your life for them
Up the sharp hills
In the teeth of the wind
If you love me
Bring me daisies
Wild daisies
That I will cram
In a bright vase
And marvel at
Bub Bridger
Napier #NZWOMANPOETS
Who am I?
Who is anyone?
To know what feeds
Your soul-hungers
deepest need?
The monk reads
The sower seeds
The mother feeds
The workers deeds
The calling leads…
Follow the calling.
Talitha Fraser
itellyouarise 