Struggles

The Buddha’s face an artisan has tried to make serene,
then weather and the creeping plants have finished off, has been
for ages staring at the children fishing on the pier.
One boy has caught a lovely fish. It doesn’t understand
what has it hooked, or why it cannot breathe the air,
but struggles wilfully, its eyes like zeros only seeing
dazzle, while its tail fin slaps and thuds against the land.
The bodhisattvas thought there was some other form of being
or not-being, than thrashing on this line. Somewhere all glides
in calm, and silky sunbeams stroke their golden sides.

On a Chinese Ferry Boat

The ferry runs for miles and miles to seaward
but the water is still liquid dung.
The Chang Jiang vomits its cloaca inside outwards
and the sea is creeping China.
Bit by bit the islands, how-so-ever widely-flung
are destined to be hillocks among khaki fields of furrows,
and the straits between them only to be minor
rivers winding through the lands of Chin.
The fish in their own Middle Kingdom, burrow
busily beneath us, trying to let the water in.

The Holy Mountain

Not just the hermits
rising every day before the dawn to wait
on rocky rafts in clouds for it;
nor all the monks and nuns
with bronze gongs longing for it late;
nor all the monkeys squatting in the thousand-foot-high branches looking down
at all the pilgrims in un-
broken sequences up all the up-stairs panting
upwards and down all the down-stairs down;
nor all the toiling porters
crucified beneath the flexing poles of pannikins
weighed down with beer and onions
and undamaged bags of eggs; but all the ordinary sorts
who taking it for sacred, never tread the mountain,
who imagine it abandoned and its cries the shrieks of demons -
all are waiting for the Dragon.
At its stirrings they grow loud with dread, and mounting
eagerness. Its snoring reassures them that it is asleep, not dead.
Its bird-sung silence becomes agony
to them : they shout and bang on things in case it slips away.
We are all living in the shadows of the mountain. Are you ready
for the moment when the Dragon wakes?

Nicholas Messenger had his first poems published in New Zealand as a schoolboy. He won the Glover Poetry award in New Zealand in the 1970’s. In 2006 he has had poems published in About The Arts, Blackmail, Boloji, Coffee Press Journal, High Altitude Poetry, Identity Theory, Jacket, Monkey Kettle, Off Course, Pulsar, Taj Mahal Review, Web Poetry Corner and WOW. He has had a few small one-man shows of his paintings.

He was born in 1945, and after completing a degree at Auckland University, travelled extensively in South America, and lived in Europe for several years. For a long time he made his living as a teacher, of science, art, and languages, in High Schools in New Zealand, where he was a long-standing member of mountain Search and Rescue organisation. Now, after nine years in Japan teaching English, he is running a small home-stay business in Hokitika, New Zealand, with his Japanese wife. He has two grown-up children from a previous marriage.

Email: Nicholas Messenger

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