#Dinah hawken

[pairedaeza]

...here, in Paekākāriki, outside my window the Tasman Sea, moon-bound, rises and falls. It breaks up on the sea wall and falls.

Dinah Hawken, from 'The uprising'. Published in No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand.

#Dinah hawken #poetry #words

[theroadtoelle]

Dinah Hawken

I discovered Dinah Hawken while doing a challenge on Writing.com.

Dinah was born in New Zealand in 1943 and she spent a number of years living in the United States, working with the homeless and mentally ill. Her poems speak of her experiences, but also often have a focus on women’s issues. She has had a number of books published.

And although a poem

can enclose you

like the rocky arms

of a…

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#Dinah Hawken #New Zealand #poems #poetry

[bookandcover]

Balance, Dinah Hawken

1  

I had just chosen this theme when the global situation suddenly deteriorated. The whole gang started moving in — the Cubans, the Syrians, the terrorists, the big boys, of course, toying with their accumulated ammunition. I backed down into a thin, very beautiful woman, willing to offer anything they wanted — a miniature daffodil, some sort of love, to accommodate the blunt end of their strategies, plans, a glove —

when a quiet and terrifying poet, Adrienne Rich, stepped in. She stood there with an M16 at her back. I lay dreadfully apart on the carpet. Then her voice began unfolding like layered rock in the afternoon sun, precision glancing off, in striking bands, and it was clear that she offered me a future — a precarious one, with a constantly human body and two huge wings. And I remembered what they planned to hack from our dark gently breathing lands.

2

So I take hold of this poem which has come from the front. From the newspaper. From a narrow crack in a stack of exploded concrete. From the hand of a paratrooper, reaching out through the crack to a friend, in Lebanon. From the voice of a marine, pleading under collapsed stories of man-made rock, ‘Don’t leave me here.’ And what I ask from far below my own life, as the rescue work goes on, and what we must know in this time of crisis, yes, and grief, hunching towards the best, most ambitious dead end of all, is where are the women, where exactly are we?

3

We have been watching here for years, and we know, that power split from the source of its own body and breath is of a mind to divide everything else on earth, even the simplest thing, for a brief desperate show of brilliance; and that we, crouched, still, in the hills of our bodies, are most needed when we are most revolted. And we don’t know, living as we do in the decadence of division, whether we can stand binding love into this accuracy, and if we do, whether we can hold it there.

From It Has No Sound and Is Blue by Dinah Hawken 

(Victoria University Press, 1987)

#dinah hawken #it has no sound and is blue #poetry #new zealand #adrienne rich #why i write poetry #it offers me a future #a precarious one

[bibliomancyoracle]

and hold it, at the height of your heart

and give it your full attention, give it every chance

to be seen and heard, give yourself over

to an act of motherhood,

give this child a name

*

from "The Dream Child" by Dinah Hawken

#Dinah Hawken #bibliomancy

[bibliomancyoracle]

You might see

the old shack

where the fucker still lives.

*

from "Thinking about Forgiveness" by Dinah Hawken

#Dinah Hawken #bibliomancy