Mark Pirie
Polar Bears
For Bjørn Lomborg
polar bears
are dying off
melting slowly
with the ice bergs
of global warming
          like this poem
                    drifting off
                              into the sea
                                        but let’s make
                                                  wave energy
                              and bring them back
                    to safety
or maybe lower our guns
a fraction.
Thinking of Hemingway
I Google
the Irati River, Spain
and find
literary fishing tours
relating to passages
from Hemingway’s
1920s novel.
His prose has elements
of the travel writer.
After all, he was going
to write non-fiction,
not novels.
The hardness has endured,
his modern and frank
writing, of the jazz age.
I think he would
Smile at the literary fishing tours
given his old man and the sea,
and raise a glass.
For art’s sake
the
journalist
wrote
a
story
about
art
          the
          art
          of
          it
          was
          the
          story
                    the journalist
                    the art
                    the artist
                    the story
                              the devil in the detail
Bruno
(A Post Lockdown Blues)
I stand on a motorway bridge
and the traffic is gone, eerie,
as if I am in a scene from
The Quiet Earth. Who am I?
It’s jazz, a drummer I once saw
on the stage at Mountain Rock…
Bruno Lawrence, it is, the legend
of ‘80s film. The cancer
took him out well before lockdown.
I walked his cinematic walk
like it was him in the deserted city,
the quiet streets beating without rhythm.
Mark Pirie (b.1974) is an internationally published New Zealand poet, editor, publisher and archivist for PANZA (Poetry Archive of NZ Aotearoa). In 2016, his selected poems, Rock & Roll, was published by Bareknuckle Books, Australia (available from the publisher's website: http://www.bareknucklebooks.com/authors/mark-pirie/). Other books include a biography, Tom Lawn, Mystery Forward (ESAW, 2018), an artbook Folk Punk (2020) and Gallery (poetry) published by Salt, England, 2003. He is a former founder/editor of JAAM, 1995-2005, publisher for HeadworX 1998-, and currently edits broadsheet: new new zealand poetry, 2008-. Website: www.markpirie.com.
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