Yes

YES

I like the way
you slip out
of your things
pausing
between zip and
catch of breath
as if you were
punctuating
a movement; a phrase
of love. God

it cheers me
when you move with purpose: animal
grace and awareness
of the urgency with
which agents
of locomotion take
us from a to z
table to bed and
back to the floor
again: hip hip

Yes, and I love
the way our limbs
construct
a superstructure
to a heavenly
accommodation; cheers

me no end

Hone Tuwhare

Earlier I’ve posted love poems by Roma Potiki and Cilla McQueen. Implicit in both is sexuality, but Hone Tuwhare positively glows about its power. Eros is dynamic, exhuberant and triumphant. Whereas the other earlier two poems are rather sweetly naïve, his is mature, confident, earthy, indeed cocksure.

A Good Day

Yesterday was a good day. Quiet but full of satisfying events. Sunshine – the fourth day running. It lifts the spirits. It begins to feel that spring is on the way. The daphne’s in bloom.

My normal caregiver was away ill on Friday. So yesterday a replacement turned up, a lovely young Sri Lankan woman who’s going back there to be married in five week’s time. After showering me she was going off to relieve the parents of an autistic girl for seven hours. We must not forget we still have a caring welfare state.

I explored the blog of Tim Jones, a young Wellington poet. Good stuff.

Helen, my twice-a-month secondary school student gardener, started her seasonal work. She and Anne planted polyanthus, lettuce, rocket, a new thyme and oregano, and generally tidied up the section. Terribly frustrating for me not being able to give them a hand.

I watched the rugby replay. Tasman beat North Harbour in a nail-biting match. The new TV certainly gives a better as well as a larger picture.

After dinner – lentils and bacon hock – Anne and I watched City Lights Chaplin’s most famous film. Slapstick and sentimentality. I found myself with tears in my eyes at the end. I’ve always been a sucker for movie sentimentality. Kubrick and Orson Welles both included this movie in their top ten. I can see why.

Education Change

The 1989 education reform ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’ needs to be seen in a historical context. Education structures and delivery mechanisms do not arise in a vacuum. Over time forces build up - perceived or unarticulated needs, ideological drives, technological developments - to erupt into big structural changes. This change is not constant; moments of acceleration are preceded and followed by relative stability.

What education system would one design if one started with a blank slate - no, a clear whiteboard; no, not even that, an interactive computer linked to an international network? There is less choice than we realise. Education follows wider forces and trends. A minor example, until recently our education terms followed the lactation cycle of the cow as well as summer shearing and harvesting.

At the macro-level, from the Renaissance students sat at the feet of the masters, the great lawyer, the great prioress, the great scholar, or learnt their trade from a master craftsman - the apprentice model of education.

After the Industrial Revolution, a factory-type processing of knowledge developed, not just in schools but in universities as well. Throughout the industrialised world a system of compulsory schooling was introduced. Students were graded by age as well as ability and increasingly were taught by teachers specially trained for the task. Systems of inspection were introduced to ensure national standards. The bureaucracies and the structures which developed reflect that origin, as well as the state paternalism of the 20th century which was a response to its excesses.

Now we have an Information Revolution, mind-boggling in its collapse of distance. In my life-time the warehouse of knowledge has expanded with a rapidity that in one sense is frightening, in another exhilirating. Computers and telecommunications not only transform our ideas of distance - at the click of a button educators and students can access information from Tokyo or London, and vice versa - but also our ideas of learning. Education cannot remain in a time-warp unaware of this roller-coaster ride.

We are now in a different era. Teachers, especially primary, know this. They design programmes to meet the individual needs of the children. Whole-class teaching at this level is now not so common. Group teaching is just normal while teachers set - often collaboratively - individual pupils tasks they then work through. However, self-generating learning is a skill rather exhausting to instil. Ask any parent. It is one of the reasons why teachers complain of stress and overload.

An Early Birthday Present

I’ll have my 75th birthday next month. Anne’s given me an early present. TVs were reduced at a sale so she upgraded our old 18 inch for a new 37 inch digital. It was installed yesterday. I spent some time luxuriating before the big screen with its clearer definition. Question time in parliament is now available to me. The ads are more sexy and the rugby promos offer even better viewing.

In the evening I watched an old (1936) Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times. The little tramp struggles to survive in the industrialised world. It’s a movie of its times, the great depression, strikes and unemployment. The comedy and the pathos of the tramp’s attempts to get a better life merge into the love interest with Paulette Goddard, an orphaned waif which forms the central part of that dream – it contrasts with the hovel they find to inhabit

The film ends with the tramp and the waif walking off into the sunset - a very Chaplin type ending.

Marahau

A spot where we’ve had good seaside holidays is Marahau at the south end of the Abel Tasman Park. We stayed in friend Rex’s bach/house. On our first visit his parents still had their farmhouse up the valley, full of fresh vegetables which his father insisted on sharing with us. Also up the valley was a raspberry farm. Anne’s two boys greatly enjoyed the experience of picking the berries and eating the odd one along the way. Not like the time we toured Central Otago. We went cherry picking. As we took the buckets to be weighed the youngest Patrick asked could he eat one. He’s been up in the trees and hadn’t popped a single cherry in his mouth, We took him back and sent him up a tree to eat a few.

We ate the raspberries as soon as we got back to the house with ice-cream. The berries were still sun-warm. Delectable. But the real foraging took place at low tide midst the extensive cockle beds. Up early on the empty beach filling a bucket with the delicious little shellfish, is a healing experience. A heron back-lit by spangled waves and a still pool reflecting the pair of oyster catchers standing in it completed an atmosphere of timelessness. Apart from the slight sound of waves the only noise was a weka’s call from the bush echoing across the beach.

Later, the cockles opening in a pot on the stove, the weka struts through the open door as if it owns the place, stabbed at a fly or two and wandered off again. There is satisfaction in gathering food and processing it straight away. It links a person across the ages to a shared humanity.

The house had a very sunny dunny. I was sitting there, door ajar, surveying the scene, eating plums picked straight off a tree when the weka appeared, eyed my bare toes with great interest. I think the sandal buckle took its fancy. There was a hasty pulling up of shorts and a throwing of a plum stone to divert the bird’s attention. Toes were safe for the time being.

That weka was a menace. It’d take spoons or other shiny objects and seemed to think it owned the place. Only once did it have take second place. I was reading in a deck chair overlooking the beach when I heard this tremendous noise. It was a skyhawk jet let loose from Ohakea. It screamed overhead. Too late the weka called its alarm, chattering its outrage at this intrusion of its quiet space.

We went for day walks into the park and drove to potteries and vineyards. On one of these trips we bought a box of fresh apricots. We came to a ford. Anne said “you can’t go through there” and of course I said “we can” and went ahead. Halfway across she screamed. I knew I mustn’t stop so I kept going. When we got through I found the cause of the mayhem. A giant huhu beetle had crawled out from the apricots. Anne’s character analysis of me intrigued the boys. In vain I protested I couldn’t have stopped. Silence hung over the trip home until she suddenly began laughing. She did insist, however, I empty the box. There were no more beetles. She had never seen one before that day. Nor since.

The huhu is our largest beetle. I hadn’t seen one since I’d left Okuti. An open window and an inside light was an invitation for them to crash inside. They are more scary than harmful. They were plentiful there because there were rotting pine stumps on the knoll and most of them had grubs in them. The adults only live for a fortnight and do not eat anything. They mate and die. I suspect being a huhu must be the dullest of existences.

Skills We Have Learnt

Skills We Have Learnt

Walking past to pick up my prescription
I pause to watch a class at Kelburn Normal
practice hockey skills: trap; then shoot, trap;
then shoot. Energy & enthusiasm shout
the air. I used to be not bad, in Hagley mist,
or later, Hauraki fog. And so to coaching.

One girl - also in my school production -
developed a crush. To dampen ardour I
mentioned my engagement to someone
from another town. Mistake! A rival gave
her challenge, her pursuit became even
more resolute - I must never be alone
with her.

Idealistic, such naivety about
relationships. I would not like again to be
that young schoolmaster, long sports fields ago.

Harvey McQueen.

Folk ask why do I write poems? Simple answer. It’s part compulsion, part satisfaction, part a desire to explain and share. It’s why I have a blog. The feedback is revealing and interesting. Some want more literature, less education. Others want the reverse. You should be more revealing one person said. Another, you wallow in nostalgia.

It’s my existence I’m wrestling with – not in a negative sense. And feedback is part of that process. I’ve had a dual career. If I’d specialised I might have gone further in that field. Water under the bridge. But it’s been fun to have dabbled in both streams and all the while bubbling in the background has been this secret soul called Harvey having his own heresies, prejudices and fulfilments.

All I know is that as the years go by I find I have an increasing necessity to scribble. Enough said.

Childhood Games

During my childhood Uncle Charlie and Aunty Thora who lived over the road had a pet magpie, which shared its time between the two households. Each place possessed two chopping blocks. As soon as one split a piece of wood Joey jumped in to look for grubs and slaters. So one shifted to the next block - my job to cut the kindling, usually old totara that split beautifully. Each axe-blow was expectant treasure trove for Joey.

More importantly, Charlie and Thora had three daughters, Marlene, Robin and Judy. Marlene, younger than me but older than my brother Douglas, full of quips and chuckles like her mother, was as reckless as I was cautious. She would respond to any dare, her presence a good tonic for a serious boy. The five of us played together nearly all our spare time. Whenever Pop my grandfather was around so were his sheep dogs. They joined in our games of rugby, tag, hide & seek, bar the door, tip and run cricket, hopscotch, king of the castle and Indians and Cowboys, colliding and colluding with one another and with us.

We played the same games at school. There were lots of aerial attacks, arms spread out and making whirring noises we attacked, counter-attacked and dive-bombed. "You're dead," "No I'm not" a constant refrain. On the lawn we played ring a ring a rosie and put your left leg in, put your left leg out. Sometimes we played British and Germans but no one wanted to be Germans, they always lost. Joey tried to join in, he couldn't understand why the dogs didn't treat him as one of them. After all the humans treated him as an equal.

After school, weekends, holidays, the five of us played school or house a lot - very stereotyped; me father, Marlene mother, and the other three unruly kids. Mum had a new wood-burning Shacklock stove installed, the old discard lay out the back. Being father seemed to consist of chopping wood for the old stove upon which Marlene cooked. Every now and then Mum would complain at the waste of wood, so we mixed cold pretend food. Some of the concoctions we ate - Mum grew a lot of peas and tomatoes in her garden, we'd mush these up with cochineal nicked from the pantry - it is a wonder we did not poison ourselves.

One day Marlene decided we needed fresh milk for her mixture. One rarely argued with Marlene. "Get some hay," she ordered. We got some out of the barn and billy in hand advanced on the cow. Doug held out the hay. The cow started chewing contentedly. Judy held the billy while Marlene tried to squeeze milk out of the udder. At the unexpected pressure the cow reacted, it couldn't go forwards, Doug was there so it went backwards. Pups were there. The cow went right over them, scattering them squealing but unhurt in all directions. Marlene was not to be beaten. "Hold her".

The cow had other ideas by now. She could carry me hanging on to her neck. "Get her in the bail." Doug got some more hay and laid a trail to the barn. The cow was reluctant to put her head into the trap but we pushed incautiously from behind, (under Pop's gentle administration she'd never learnt to kick) while Doug baited the trap. Greed overcame caution, she put her head through and we had her. But a bailed cow need not deliver milk. To complicate matters one of the pups decided to rumple through the hay the cow was eating and put an experimental paw on the large tongue.

Bucking and twisting the cow tried to pull away. Instinct told her to kick. We felt that whiff of fear that goes with naughtiness and fright. Quickly we freed her. "Didn't know the old girl had it in her," Marlene pronounced. "You've all very quiet," Mum said when we came inside. "The old thing's going dry early this year," Pop commented that evening.

The pups suffered for our games, wrapped up tight in a blanket they replaced the dolls in the girls' prams, squiggling things that sooner or later Houdini escaped over the side to sit looking smug and affectionate at our feet. My other task as father consisted of disciplining the kids. Playing school saw me as teacher and the other four as unruly pupils – a recipe for trouble. Either activity saw lots of threats that usually degenerated into a rough and tumble, sometimes grass or mud fights. Every now and then we would revert to stones which meant either Mum or Thora arriving with angry threats of punishment.

Looking back the striking things about our play is the lack of consumerism. We had few toys. We made our own fun. Except for a few childhood games we played at what adults did in real life or in the movies.