Poem 410

This is from an exercise I wrote in Bill Manhire’s Original Composition course in 1984 … Bill gave us images as a writing provocation … mine was a photo of a bunch of men in a pub evidently from the fifties or early sixties, all pakeha of a certain age, beefy and beery, a quintessential slab of Kiwiana … I channelled the TAB work functions I’d glimpsed as a child and a couple of Rotorua City Council parties from when I was a chainman plus my memories of working in a very male office at the Reserve Bank during the dark days of the 81 tour …

… seventeen years later when I’d just started teaching at the IIML someone doing a bit of archiving of coursework from the years of creative writing at Victoria found the poem and accompanying image and recognised my name … I pinned it up on the bare noticeboard in my office and the next time Bill came in it caught his eye … he said “why is there a photo of my father on your wall?” … turns out it wasn’t a random image but one from Bill’s family – his father was a publican and the photo was of some sort of pub lock-in with various worthies of the Dunedin community …

( … rugby and beer, there’s only the racing missing … I like the 8oz beers which was the size of the glasses back then … the flagons cigarettes and non-driving wives also contribute to the flavour of the times … )

Collapsed Scrum

These are the boys who bloody near broke their necks
scrumming down on the floor
at the work do

their wives who only saw each other
every Christmas all said it was a pity
they couldn't drive

as they watched them wrestling back and forth
on the wet floor all cigarettes and 8oz beers
out of slippery flagons

all collapsing in a heap
of lost buttons and wrenched ties
rucking and rucking away

and no bloody ball to clear