SMUDGE - our new kitten

Scott's book 'To the Moon, in Seven Easy Steps' is now out and can be bought through Titus Books and at bookstores like Timeout in Mt Eden, Parsons Bookshop Auckland, Unity Wellington and Auckland, UBS in Dunedin.

Jack Ross wrote on the backcover:"Scott Hamilton's heroes, like WH Auden's 'helmeted airmen', are forever setting out on some doomed quest...Scott delves into the mytho-poetic past of New Zealand, showing that this past is alive and shared"

Katyn (for Cerian)

The soldier stepped out of the pines, and walked

to the centre of the clearing, and knelt

and dug a hole, a long shallow hole, with his hands,

and lay down in his hole

and covered himself with dirt

and had a heart attack.

This happened five thousand times, maybe

more, in Katyn forest, in 1940.

At the Cheeky Kumara Cafe

we choose a window table.

Threshers the size of tanks

level a field of wheat,

a field of barley,

and three moths stick to our window.

They are scraps of paper,

scraps of thin yellow paper,

Polish army stationery issue,

scraps from the same page of a letter,

from Leszek Staff's last letter to Gertrude Boll,

written in Smolensk, on May the 5th, 1940,

and torn up by an NKVD intelligence officer

who got hard reading about troop movements

and resistance cellsnot a pair of silk lace stockings

slipping off freshly shaven legs

in Krakow Municipal Gardens.

You stir the last of the sugar into my tea.

We know how to dispose of our dead

correctly. Follow that gravel road

over a train track, then up a small hill

until the fields part for a red-rooved chapel

and its flock of stones.

Every name there faces north.

Out the back, behind the water tap,

are plots reserved for the elderly, the infirm.

Red earth foams over the newest graves.

This afternoon the reverend's outmaking his rounds,

and relatives are at the races.

Nobody is there to see Leszek Staff

stagger out of the barley, and fall

to his knees, and dig

for four minutes, in the soft red soil,

and lie down comfortably

to die, to be discovered.

Outside the cafe

a truck backfires.

Delhi, 1857: a bloody warning to today's imperial occupiers

A century and a half after the Indian mutiny, echoes of the arrogance and lies that sparked insurgency could not be clearer

William Dalrymple Thursday May 10, 2007 The Guardian

Soon after dawn on May 11 1857, 150 years ago this week, the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was saying his morning prayers in his oratory overlooking the river Jumna when he saw a cloud of dust rising on the far side of the river. Minutes later, he was able to see its cause: 300 East India Company cavalrymen charging wildly towards his palace...read the rest of this interesting article here

More on the Indian Mutiny here

Maps and I had fish n chips in Westmere and enjoyed the sunset.

My first attempt at a poem in 13 years (with assistance from Maps).

the cicada stepped out of its skin

into the breeze

she picks the shell

gently

off the pine sap

the dumpy dripping staligmite

she lets the breeze lift it

drop it

onto broken needles

where a condom leaks

like a punctured jellyfish