Garth Dutton

Reversable Poem – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:40:26 +0000

The third writing exercise at the Kensington & Norwood Writers Group was to write a ‘reversable poem’, that can be read, and still make some sense, when read either up or down. We had to start writing it last line first, and work our way through to the first line.

My poem is simply called, ‘Reversable Poem’.

Reversable Poem
© Garth Dutton, 2010

Long morning.
Car windows misted-up.
Crows call from stobie pole.
T.V. is on, but the program is off the mark.
Mailman brings no letters.
Waiting for change of fortune.
Listlessly listening to music.
Beer or wine?
Winter day.
Rain squalls.

Rain squalls.
Winter day.
Beer or wine?
Listlessly listening to music.
Waiting for a change of fortune.
Mailman brings no letters.
T.V. is on, but the program is off the mark.
Crows call from stobie pole.
Car windows are misted-up.

Collage – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:34:26 +0000

The second poem I wrote as part of a writing exercise set up by the Kensington & Norwood Writers Group. The task was to write a poem in a format called ‘collage’.

We were given a dozen pieces of paper of varying sizes and shapes, and had to write a line of poetry on each of them. Then we had to shuffle the pieces of paper into a heap, draw them out at random, and however they came out was the poem.

The result of my effort is simply called ‘Collage’

Collage
© Garth Dutton, 2010

Reflected light from a rock pool.
In Kansas it is easy to believe the world is flat.
‘Centre of a triangle’ written at the centre of a triangle.
Daybreak rises.
Trip on kerbing and nearly break wrist.
Cold wind whistles around drainpipe.
Friends come back from McDonnell Ranges, three days early,
rained out in July.
Icelandic volcano closes down Europe’s airways.
Hooray! Coopers Creek flood reaches Lake Eyre.
The River Torrens is trying to stay calm
in the wind. The waves are reduced to ripples.
If I lock my screen door at night,
I’d never get out in an earthquake.
White gum blossom/ lots of honeyeaters/ too cold for bees.

Window – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:53:45 +0000

I am a regular attendee at the Kensington & Norwood Writers Group poetry workshops and at the latest workshop we were given an exercise of writing a poem from a list of single words to be used as a the title. I wrote three poems from this exercise with the first one called “Window”

Hope you like it…

Window
© Garth Dutton, 2010

Window pane is cracked.
Paint peels from weatherboard.
Mining town
when mines have been closed.
Even the pub is run-down.

Winter Feast – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 01:57:18 +0000

Winter Feast
© Garth Dutton, 2010

The white-flowering gum tree
over my back fence
is in full bloom
in early June.

On sunny winter days
it is full of noisy birds
busy eating nectar.
Lorikeets, wattle birds,
New Holland honeyeaters,
and more.

As I type this poem,
the sounds of birds
drift through an open window.
Natural background music.

Baia Dos Tigres, Angola – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Sat, 22 May 2010 02:54:12 +0000

Baia Dos Tigres, Angola

© Garth Dutton 2010

I can envisage a bay

with shifting tides and currents,

and tiger stripes of sandbars.

The name suggests to sailors

that they sail into the bay

as one would walk into a jungle

in which it was known

there were tigers.

The name also shows

that the Portuguese Navigators

knew what tigers were

long before they reached India.

Cape Verde – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Fri, 21 May 2010 02:30:00 +0000

Here is a poem that is part of a series of poems inspired by Portuguese place names on the African coast

Cape Verde

© Garth Dutton 2010

After the long, long sail

down the Sahara Coast,

they came to a Cape that was green.

Not just green,

but verdant green.

So green,

it was like an emerald

at the edge of the sea

Eugene Terreblanche – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:26:43 +0000

My latest poem is called Eugene Terreblanche and it’s about the Afrikaner Resistance Movement leader who was killed in South Africa a couple of weeks ago. His movement had been demanding that an all- white ‘ homeland’ be set up somewhere in South Africa.

Eugene Terreblanche
© Garth Dutton, 2010

A South African
of French Huguenot descent,
Afrikaner Resistance Movement leader
Eugene Terreblanche
is dead,
killed by black workers on his farm
during a bitter pay dispute.

He believed his Afrikaner ethnic group
was specially created by God
after the Creation.
Anyone who believes they are
one of God’s Chosen People,
or a Master Race,
or Direct Descendants of the Sun God,
and so on,
is faced with one immediate problem…
‘How do they treat everyone else?’
The answer is always the same,
‘Quite appallingly.’

Cabo Frio, Namibia – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:09:42 +0000

Here is another poem for your reading pleasure. It is called “Cabo Frio, Namibia.”

During the Age of Exploration, Portuguese Navigators’ reports of the exploration of the African coast were closely guarded state secrets, to keep the information out of the hands of other European powers. In the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, the repository of all those reports, the Casa da India, collapsed and burned, so destroying all those documents. A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of poems to try to re-create them by writing poems about how various places on the African coast might have got their Portuguese names.

This is one of the poems…

The Portuguese Navigators
reached Cabo Frio, (Cold Cape),
where the full force of
the icy Benguela Current
sweeps up from the south
and begins to merge
with tropical seas,
so confirming to the Navigators
that the world was round.

Reaching that Cape
may have been
the most important event
in maritime history,
for it marked
the beginning of the end
of all sailors’ greatest fear,
namely the fear of
sailing off the edge of the world…
A fear that had paralysed
open ocean navigation
for millennia.

This is possibly
why Columbus knew it was safe
to cross the Atlantic.

Mitsubishi’s Contribution To Mathematics – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:23:38 +0000

In World War Two
the Zero became a plane.
In fact, one of the finest fighter planes
ever built.

So since then
a zero isn’t nothing
anymore.

Suburbia Pigeons – A Poem

Garth Dutton — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 02:47:23 +0000

These birds
have adapted beautifully
to life in Adelaide’s suburbs.
Originally Burmese doves,
they came from the hot wet climate
of a tropical rain forest.

Here they have adapted
to a cool wet winter
and a long hot dry summer.
There would not have been
one item of food from
their original rain forest home
available here.

They had to find a new year-round diet
from scratch, and have done so.
In some Adelaide suburbs,
native topknot pigeons and suburbia pigeons
have separate territories.

In other suburbs,
they share backyards and parks.
And I am sure they now
have no ‘racial memory’
of their original rain forest home.

They are in Adelaide to stay.