Common throughout India, cheerful and active bird these are mostly found in pairs. Head and throat glossy black, a slight crest on the head, characteristic crimson patch under the tail. Several races are classified by the amount of black in the plume. An arboreal bird, sometime descent to pick up food, has short strong flights. They are also known for their melodious call notes. James Baxter: What happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology
He who would be a poet must
see the world in a grain of dust
and beauty in a rainy day
James Baxter (1926-1972) was one incredible New Zealand poet and a heck of a guy. Reading about him itself was quit
e an amazing experience! Why not? When the guy as a kid burns his hand on the stove to protest against institutional education you know you are not dealing with ordinary. After a stint of odd jobs (even worked as a postman for many years), alcoholism and adopting Catholicism, he was travelling Asia with stipend from UNESCO and ended up in Shantiniketan (there is a collection of poem titled ‘Howrah Bridge’). He later created a commune in Maori settlement- Jerusalem. Baxter lived a sparse existence ('It is absurd to say I am really a poor man while I keep on putting words together. Words set in order are mental possessions’) and wrote poems that were more political in nature and questioned the New Zealand society. Despite the fact that he died relatively young, a prolific poet- who started writing as early as when he was seven- he left a huge body of work.
“It is the business of a poet, I think, to be destitute as well as honest. He may have money; but he should recognise that it is dirt. He may have prestige; but let him hate it and wear it like an old filthy coat. Then he may be able to stay awake a little better. Love will not harm him, though. It will slice him open like a fish, and hang him by the heels, and let the sun into his private bag of dreams and idiot ambitions. He will think he is dying when he is just beginning to wake up” (‘Writing and Existence’)
From the poem Pig Island letter
Tonight I read my son a story
About the bees of Baiame, who tell the east wind
To blow down rain, so that the flowers grow
In dry Australia, and the crow wirinun
Who jailed the west wind in a hollow log:
My son who is able to build a tree house
With vine ladders, my son
In his brown knitted jersey and dungarees,
Makes clowns and animals, a world of creatures
To populate paradise
High Country Weather
Alone we are born,
And die alone.
Yet see the red-gold cirrus,
Over snow-mountain shine.
Upon the upland,
Ride easy stranger.
Surrender to the sky,
Your heart of anger.
From Two Songs for Lazarus
It is the month of the dead,
The Bengalese will die.
The weakness in my head
Makes verse hard to try;
The fast like an iron tomb
Is shutting out the sky.
From the poem Beyond the Palisade
They had their gods to shield them—we have none.
None save the marrowless steel-blade.
On our wrists like leeches hang, silver of blood,
our hills, our forests; the alien sun
stares through silver and green on us; for here
even our fear,
our love loses its focus: the sad cretin
walks abroad in the rotten hearts of the failing towns.
New blood moves briefly; unPolynesian, our deaths are near.
From the hills no dream but death frowns.
From Air flight to Delhi
The homeless in the Mogul tombs
Cannot despair because they do not hope,
On the great star wheel pulled apart
Show the disastrous innocence
Of one who murders in his sleep.
The cross is clouded here with market dust.
From A Rope for Harry Fat
Oh some have killed in angry love
And some have killed in hate,
And some have killed in foreign lands
To serve the business State.
The hangman’s hands are abstract hands
Though sudden death they bring—
‘The hangman keeps our country pure,’
Says Harry Fat the King.
From To Any Young Man who Hears my Verses Read in a Lecture Room
When some cheese-headed ladder-climber reads
A poem of mine from the rostrum,
Don’t listen. That girl in her jersey and beads,
Second row from the front, has the original nostrum
I blundered through nine hundred parties and ninety-eight pubs
In search of. The words are a totem
Erected long after for scholars and yobs
Who’d make, if they could, a bicycle-seat of my scrotum
A Pair of Sandals
A pair of sandals, old black pants
And leather coat – I must go, my friends,
Into the dark, the cold, the first beginning
Where the ribs of the ancestor are the rafters
Of a meeting house – windows broken
And the floor white with bird dung – in there
The ghosts gather who will instruct me
And when the river fog rises
Te ra rite tonu te Atua -
The sun who is like the Lord
Will warm my bones, and his arrows
Will pierce to the centre of the shapeless clay of the mind.
Hemi.
This mail I found from one of the links
I used to meet James Baxter at the Shamrock Coffee Bar in Wellington 2-3 times a week in the early 60s.
Every now and then he would give me a hand written poem and hand it to me saying..."I made you a poem man" and in return, I would buy him food and coffee.
Alas! Those poems were lost long long ago..a friend 'borrowed' a book that had the poems concealed between the leaves. I expect that those priceless affirmations of James' friendship were perhaps discarded as worthless graffiti.
My loss has no bounds.
Some scribbles...
Thoughts
The sky is not the end of sight
there is a world beyond
that fails the eyes
only thoughts can traverse
and converse with those once mattered,
share a joke
and journey back all at an instance.
People on the beach
least aware, of the
leaps between the world.
In the crowd
Let the thought be
let it go free
sit in the favourite perch
and see the world dance
burst of colours and myriad sounds,
breath it all
take it in your vein
let it live you
let it be.
