Rocket Show
As warm north rain breaks over suburb houses,
Streaming on window glass, its drifting hazes
Covering harbour ranges with a dense hood:
I recall how eighteen months ago I stood
Ankle-deep in sand on an Otago beach
Watching the fireworks flare over strident surf and bach,
In brain grey ash, in heart the sea-change flowing
Of one love dying and another growing.
For love grows like the crocus bulb in winter
Hiding from snow and from itself the tender
Green frond in embryo; but dies as rockets die
(White sparks of pain against a steel-dark sky)
With firebird wings trailing an arc of grief
Across a night inhuman as the grave,
Falling at length a dull and smouldering shell
To frozen dunes and the wash of the quenching swell.
There was little room left where the crowd had trampled
Grass and lupin bare, under the pines that trembled
In gusts from the sea. On a sandhillock I chose
A place to watch from. Then the rockets rose,
O marvellous, like self-destroying flowers
On slender stems, with seed-pods full of flares,
Raining down amber, scarlet, pennies from heaven
On the skyward straining heads and still sea-haven.
Had they brought death, we would have stood the same,
I think, in ecstasy at the world-end flame.
It is the rain streaming reminds me of
Those ardent showers, cathartic love and grief.
As I walked home through the cold street by moon-light,
My steps ringing in the October night,
I thought of our strange lives, the grinding cycle
Of death and renewal come to full circle,
And of man’s heart, that blind Rosetta stone,
Mad as the polar moon, decipherable by none.
While certainly distinct from each other, I really believe that Australian and New Zealand poetry ought to be read and appreciated as belonging to a common tradition. Notwithstanding the obvious historical and cultural similarities between the two, the main reason, I hold, is that a more profound reciprocal readership would enrich and widen our understanding of what Australian and New Zealand poetry is and can be. Shortly put, we have much to learn and gain of each other.
I think I might have mentioned elsewhere on this blog how unknown many of the best Australian poets are among an international audience, but, speaking as an Australian, I can’t say that we have given our antipodean brethren any more of a fair go. During secondary school in Australia we must have studied a score of Australian poets but not a mention was made of a single one from New Zealand. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that this ignorance lived on until very recently when I discovered the poetry of James K. Baxter, who, I am further ashamed to admit, is the only New Zealand poet represented in this website’s anthology of English-language poetry. His poetry had been unjustly overlooked by me since it is as good as any written by an Australian.
A few years ago a deep blow was dealt to Baxter’s posthumous legacy when it was revealed, through the public surfacing of a letter he had written to a friend, that he had committed marital rape. While the execrableness of the act is beyond words, it should not take away anything from his poetry, which ought to and will live unconditionally on through its own merit. Nonetheless, I can well imagine that it has already led to or will lead to the partial banishing of Baxter’s poetry from libraries, bookshops and school curricula (judging google searches for his poetry, it seems like his poetry is regularly studied at school in New Zealand). Denying the immense heritage bequeathed by this very fine artist is tragic and will be to the great detriment of New Zealand culture and literature in the future.
Form
Three stanzas of semi-bound verse. While there are some genuine rhyming couplets and lines of iambic pentameter, much of the rhyming is constituted of half-rhymes and much of the poem is metrically irregular.
Analysis
The first three lines describe a rainfall and over a landscape. This recalls a memory in the poet’s mind, when just eighteen months ago, he was standing on a beach in the Otago region of New Zealand, watching a fireworks display. At that moment in his life the poet found himself in a melancholy state (“in brain grey ash”). The cause behind this must have been a loss of love but the end of the first stanza indicates that a new love is starting to take root: “one love dying and another growing.”
The second stanza is a description of how love begins and ends and the connection between this and the memory of the fireworks display is made clearer here. Love is born hidden and unnoticed (“like the crocus bulb in winter”) and dies, like the rocket, in an explosion of anguish before extinguishing into vacuity:
as rockets die
(White sparks of pain against a steel-dark sky)
With firebird wings trailing an arc of grief
Across a night inhuman as the grave,
In the following stanza Baxter returns to the memory. He recalls the crowded beach and everybody’s attention at watching the fireworks. The fireworks are made ambivalent here: on the one hand they are something beautiful (“marvellous”) but also violent (“self-destroying”). Their connection to something much more perilous is made at the end of the stanza, where Baxter writes that the crowd would have been just as rapt looking upon the fatal flares of a battlefield:
Had they brought death, we would have stood the same,
I think, in ecstasy at the world-end flame.”
In the final stanza the poet returns briefly to the present before returning to his memory. As he looks on the falling rain he was reminded of the falling flares of the fireworks. He then recalls walking home after the display. While doubtlessly still melancholy, there is something soothing in his understanding of the cyclical, ever-shifting nature of love:
As I walked home through the cold street by moon-light,
My steps ringing in the October night,
I thought of our strange lives, the grinding cycle
Of death and renewal come to full circle,
The poet does not, however, want to indicate that he has found an answer or solution to his problems–the only discovery he has made is of love’s enigmatic mystery:
man’s heart, that blind Rosetta stone,
Mad as the polar moon, decipherable by none.