This post is in honour of Vincent who sadly passed away recently. I am reposting it due to technical problems. I first posted Being Here on the Tuesday Poem Blog in December 2014 along with an interview full of his wise words. Vincent was Poet Laureate at the time. One of New Zealand’s finest and best known writers, he is already much missed. My condolences to his wife Helen and their family. If you would like to read the interview, please go to; Being Here, Tuesday Poem, December 2014. In the near future the interview will be also be posted on The New Zealand Poetry Society’s website.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Being here, by Vincent O’Sullivan, New Zealand Poet Laureate
It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees
arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies
of the laden apricot tree without wanting
symbols – which of course are manifold – symbols
of so much else? What’s amiss with simply the huddle
and glut of bees, with those fuzzed globes
by the hundred and the clipped out sky
beyond them and the leaves that are black
if you angle the sun directly behind them,
being themselves, for themselves? I hold out
my palms like the opened pages of a book
and you pile apricots on them stacked three
deep, we ask just who can we give them to
round here who hasn’t had their whack of apricots
as it is? And I let my hands tilt and the plastic
bag that you hold rustles and plumps with their
rush, I hold one back and bite into it and its
taste is the taste of the colour exactly, and this
hour precisely, and memory I expect is storing
for an afternoon far removed from here
when the warm furred almost weightlessness
of the fruit I hold might very well be a symbol
of what’s lost and we keep wanting, which after
all is to crave the real, the branches cutting
across the sun, your standing there while I tell you,
‘Come on, you have to try one!’, and you do,
and the clamour of bees goes on above us, ‘This
will do’, both of us saying, ‘like this, being here!’
gurglewords 