Mercedes Webb-Pullman

 Poetry 

 

 

Saturday morning

 

The dining room’s half-open doors impart

a look of hasty exit; disarray

of wine glass sideways, chairs left backed away

and stains like blood on tabletop’s op art.

The carpet seems to undulate and grow

around the splintered light that makes its way

in silence. Windows introduce the day

through faded curtains. Seams and patches show.

 

He wakes beside the stranger in his bed

and shudders to recall the night before,

the easy sex before they slipped to sleep.

He’s penitent and through his aching head

pour thoughts of gender, parents, love, and more.

His offshore isolation makes him weep.

 

After ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’ by Philip Larkin 

 

 

 

The Chankiri Tree         

  

We walk around the tree

where soldiers swung babies

by their ankles, bashed out

their brains against

this trunk.

We walk around the tree
and listen for voices;

trying to imagine that smash

as our final human touch.

 

Bones grow from the ground

here in the killing fields

when it rains.
 

 

 

A stranger in the woods                       

  

Thoughtless, a child in meadows wild

(Mild is the sun, and dark the glade)

strays from the path. Enrapt, beguiled,

she bares her throat, no thought of blade.

 

Fearing no harm from stranger’s arm,

seduced by his smile, the wiles displayed,

seeking no more than friendship’s charm

she bares her throat. He bears a blade.

 

He picks black roses for her crown,

drowning her light in deepening shade,   

plays with her long hair, lets it down.

He bares her throat, presents the blade.

 

Fading the light, with it her life,

wife now of darkness; undismayed

sails the moon, a sickle knife.

Her throat is bare but for the blade.

 

 

 

A Matapouri story my father told me

  

A young boy on his way to school

along a bush track, distracted

by a huia, chased it ‘til he stopped,

lost in the farm backblocks,

the shape of the hills alien.

 

Climbing the highest, the child found

no sign of the sea that faced his home,

just dark green waves of trees,

furrows of shadowed gullies           

stretching in all directions.

 

Clouds covered the sun,

no shadows fell; he couldn’t tell

time or directions now, moss grew

on all sides of the tree trunks.

He tried to follow a creek;

rotting wood almost choked it,

dark fern fronds overhung

treacherous footing.

 

He followed a ridge instead, came

down into a clearing covered in mist

that half hid the ruins of a building.

He’d been to every settlement

along the coast yet didn’t know this place.

A woman in old-fashioned clothes

came towards him, smiling,

drew him water from a well.

 

Thirsty, he drank, looked up —

she’d vanished. The ruins, the well,

all gone. He dropped the cup, ran, fell,

picked himself up to run again,

‘til he found himself somehow

on the track back home.

 

He came across her face once,

in the family photo album, identified as

his great-grandmother, the one

who died of sorrow, so they said

when her youngest son was lost in the bush

near here, and never found.

 

 

 

Mercedes Webb-Pullman graduated from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand with her MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of Tasseography (2014) Track Tales (Truth Serum Press, 2017) and The Jean Genie (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2018). Her poems, and the odd short story, have appeared online (Bone Orchard Poetry, Caesura, Connotations, Danse Macabre, The Electronic Bridge, 4th Floor, Main Street Rag, Otoliths, Reconfigurations, Scum, Swamp, Pure Slush, Turbine, among others) and in print (Mana magazine, Poets to the People; Poetry from Lembas Cafe 2009, The 2010 Readstrange Collection, PoetryNZ Yearbook, many anthologies from Kind of a Hurricane Press, and the Danse Macabre anthologies Amour Sombre, Hauptfriedhof, and Belles-lettres (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2017 & 2018). She has also won the Wellington Cafe Poetry contest in 2010, and wrote a foreword for their collection of 2012 contest entrants, which included another of her poems. Since then she has been awarded 3rd prize in United Poets Laureate International Poetry Contest 2015, and is particularly proud of having a haiku (the only one from New Zealand) in 100 Haiku for Peace, an international publication in five languages. Her lucky number is 8. Blue. She lives in Paraparaumu Beach, New Zealand.