Discovering our inner New Zillunder

New Zealand featured strongly in last night's celebrations of Lynne Hancock's birthday ... born, as she was, fifty years earlier in Auckland ... living there now, as she and Barbel do (albeit temporarily).

"How to speak New Zillund" was distributed last night to great amusement. I particularly like:

F is for Fush - sea creatures; and

O is for One doze - a pane of glass in a wall.

Happy birthday Lynne

Lynne Hancock's 50th birthday party: a great success for all involved, especially Lynne (which is, I guess, the point). Spike did a great job creating an autumnal scroll bearing the words of my ode and Spike's leaves. I read out the poem to Lynne; in front of the assembled birthday masses. Only later did it strike me that this may have been the first occasion (outside a NSW Writers Centre poetry group meeting or one of the weekend workshops I've attended) that I've read one of my poems in public. It went down well-enough. People seemed to like it. Lynne did, which certainly was the point.

The harmonica playing was less than totally impressive. I lost the plot when people joined in, singing along to Stevie Wonder's I just called to say I love you. Spike observed later that their singing along did mean (at least) that the party goers recognised what I was attempting to play.

Lovely evening.

To Lynne as Autumn comes

(with profound apologies to Keats,
Wordsworth, Horace and Pindar)

Which one of us dare say that you are old?

Which one so careless of the woes of men

That he (or in this anti-sexist ode, a she) so bold

Would venture to suggest your five times ten

Mean less than this: the best is yet to come.

And we, your choir (not quite) invisible

Sing out with fervent hope you’ll not succumb

To slings or arrows or outrageous fortune’s visible

Detractions from the glory of your life’s great sum,

Which being greater than its parts is indivisible.

Some say life starts at forty, as if life were a cliché

Not demanding of our full attention always.

But we know more and have no need to pray

We’ll only live through tales of once and future days.

Our time is now. We will rejoice in carpe diem like the fool

Who never woke the morning after nights before

The stupid days we misspent youth in life’s hard school

Where all we’ve known and all, that vast much more,

We long ago forgot or set aside like life’s lost tool

Has led to here: the precipice from which we soar.

So not for us some melancholic meditation

On the mist and mellow fruitfulness of age.

These are the baby-boomer days of celebration

And we, the rag-tag generation who maintain the rage

About much more than just the fading of a light

At some unspecified and yet still distant point

We know we’ll one day reach to lose, at last, the fight

Rave on (as ‘Van the Man’, we did our seer anoint,

Impels us) get down and dirty, boogie on, delight

In sex ‘n drugs ‘n rock ‘n roll and, ageing girl, wreck the joint!

.