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    Way the Crocodile Taught Me
    Way the Crocodile Taught Me
    Way the Crocodile Taught Me
    Ebook66 pages24 minutes

    Way the Crocodile Taught Me

    By Karina Naomi

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    About this ebook

    Katrina Naomi's The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is the eagerly-awaited second collection by this lively and popular poet. With warmth, flair and a certain ferocious wit, Naomi tears into her subject matter: a childhood fraught with dislocation and violence but also redeemed by more tender memories of a sister and a kindly, although at times comically obtuse, grandmother.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeren
    Release dateAug 1, 2016
    ISBN9781781723326
    Way the Crocodile Taught Me

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      Book preview

      Way the Crocodile Taught Me - Karina Naomi

      Acknowledgements

      I

      2 Edinburgh Walk

      A crazy pattern on the kitchen tiles,

      each one scorched

      with the curved ship of an iron,

      its steam of holes oh oh ohing

      on the orange glaze.

      Mum frenzied with a brillo pad

      at the former tenant’s gift.

      We lived with their jilted art

      then looked on past

      to the square of garden

      where one day, Mum promised,

      we’d have a swing.

      Memory, (Margate 1969)

      My father is muffled    he stands

      away from my sister and I    We wear

      identical hats    halos    of synthetic fur

      tied with pom poms    He holds his new camera

      The sun is low    level with my eyes

      We stand on grass    just in front of the cliffs

      He shouts in the wind    says it several times

      Finally I understand    we are to smile

      I stretch the muscles of my cheeks    they touch the fur

      I don’t know if my sister smiles    she is so far below me

      He jokes about stepping back    I know I would die

      I stay where I am    take my sister’s small mitten in mine

      The Romantic

      After my father left, I grew

      a battery of hearts,

      felt each of them beat,

      like doves in a casket

      before their release. You might imagine

      the sheen of the good heart.

      I rarely picture the razor wire heart,

      its zest and sting.

      If I say my hearts have never been

      broken, or fissured, or ruptured,

      that’s not entirely true.

      Still, I want my faults intact.

      And the barbs of the heart that loved my father jut

      as if from a pike’s lower lip,

      the war of rust leaking;

      a child’s heart,

                             no larger than a grenade.

      My Parents’ Poem

      won’t be set in couplets,

                                      certainly won’t rhyme.

      I’ll let you guess the refrain,

                                           his envoi,

      after a volley of verbs.

                                   It will be Hughesian, Plathian,

      well, from that era. It will be brief,

                                                   yet I won’t understand it all.

      A work of juvenilia,

                                 their poem will try to marry certain ideals.

      It will be written in the past tense

                                                   by another woman.

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