This week’s poetic treat comes from Wellington poet and photographer, Mary Macpherson.  Mary’s poetry can be found in her first collection ‘The Inland Eye’, in the collaborative work ‘Millionaire’s Shortbread’ and in many literary journals (including Snorkel, where this poem first appeared).  Thank-you Mary, for letting me post Defiance as one of the ‘Tuesday Poems’. 

Defiance

A couch was important,
it was covered in fabric
called ‘two-tone defiance’. Wet birds
shook themselves out of trees.

You held the cat in midair
and the saying was
‘one hand on his brain
the other on his potatoes.’

The potatoes turned over
in a flash of clods.  Daylight
shimmered over everything.
Nothing was solved
by the flow of time.

Mary Macpherson