Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Word hippo, poems by Gail Ingram.
Word hippo
On this stage I pronounced Hippocrates as it’s read – Hippo crates
and I saw it wrong by the looks on your faces. Hypocrisy
is not related, nor hippopotamus in this instance
I was swimming in the river. Let me tell you I was born around
doctors who’d not remembered their oath to not harm. My mother
was taken from me. I pretended literacy in another’s
campus of hippos, and they gave me fairytales to read, not Greek
mythology about horses with serpent’s bodies. Later I set down
my own memories of who I might be. Turns out I was a good actor
on the literary stage, a monster of word gargling, the perfect
hypocrit, feigning to fly without wings through the foam.
I’ve always been hyper aware of the environment, how horses
travel in crates backwards to keep them from tripping,
if I’m honest. There are those covered in river mud
who prick up their ears. When you say doctors’ names wrong
it might sound like hippotherapy. You feel the ripple of muscle
underneath you. How those large dumb animals might carry you
through the river, a thousand actors waiting on the other side.
A good kiwi lass
after Jordan Hamel
Though her Scottish father said, you should
cut your hair, those snakes
cannot be allowed to grow, she was still
somewhat surprised years later
when a president-to-be put Hillary in her place
by frightening the masses with
a Medusa face, (a classic
advertising standard she had been taught
not to follow). But that was America
– she lived in a fair
country, and her mother had told her to get
a good education and make good
money, and take his name and
make your belly round, but first
get the ring. She took it all in,
because she wanted the white
dress and the fairytale
slipper.
At the foot
of the clean white peaks, where the air
was still fresh, she began to climb, began
to forget about cutting her golden hair,
she sought other parts of herself – not her sex,
she already knew of the Dark
Age spells and Victorian estrangement
of being adopted – it was
the native herbs she fell upon
to know herself, the star flowers
on dry mosses, the crunch of
night snow, her hand on the slow pulse
of the grey-gold hills of Te Waipounamu
she wrote of
belly scars, chewed-off stalks and fences
imposed by good kiwi blokes using
wide-eyed wives to spread the butter.
When she waved
her pen like a wild woman
holding an eel, picked up from the sacred ground,
her fingers curled over the wrinkled skin together with
her wahine half-sister she had found.
She was going up in the world,
with a backpack on, it was true,
and flowers in her hair, like edelweiss and
ngaio, she thought she was seeking a kind
of kinship until
much later
when her hair was grey, the syllables
her sister had given her – Pa-pa-tuu-aa-nu-ku
had become a whisper, then a hiss, you are
an imposter, the white people cried upholding
their bigger shinier pens until
they became snakes
in her mirror, you are an imposter.
Then, at last, she understood her place
was not here, nor
there, she should have cut her fair hair
then disappeared into the background
hills, become invisible
as her tuahine had always been, invisible as
the next lass – in-vis-ib-le
as they had been saying
for the last two thousand years.
Even in the beginning
she was half-formed, perhaps a seed
that had burst, the pale fist
that had pounded upwards into the dark
of watchful eyes and creepy crawlies but also
the earth around her like arms
until she reached the light, the first blindness,
her exposure,
she was a naked stick
knowing to reach up anyway
despite the branch of strangers
despite the husk below, a distant memory
the hole inside her stem
© Gail Ingram
Gail Ingram (she, her) writes from the Port Hills of Ōtautahi Christchurch Aotearoa New Zealand and is author of three collections of poetry. Her latest, anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024) weaves poetry and botanical and mountain art. Her second collection Some Bird (Sudden Valley Press 2023) was selected for best books 2024 by The New Zealand Listener. Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019) is set in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes. Her work has been widely published in local and international journals and anthologies, such as Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Atlanta Review, The Spinoff, Cordite Poetry Review and Barren Magazine. Awards include winning the Caselberg (2019) and New Zealand Poetry Society (2016) international poetry prizes and being shortlisted for many others. She has edited for NZ Poetry Society’s flagship magazine a fine line, Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and takahē. She teaches at Write On School for Young Writers and holds a Master of Creative Writing (Distinction).
https://www.theseventhletter.nz/ https://www.instagram.com/gail_ingram_poet