Silver Branch series
Ankh Spice - part I
Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa - New Zealand. Over the last two years, more than a hundred of his poems have been published internationally, and his work has been nominated eight times for the Pushcart Prize and/or Best of the Net. He was joint winner of The Poetry Archive’s WorldView competition in 2020 with his poem ‘New Cloth’. His reading of this poem is held in perpetuity in the Archive.
His work explores a range of themes close to his heart: environmental change, mental health, trauma, conscience, identity, queerness, physicality, mythology, natural science, spirituality, directed attention, language as magic, the unique landscape of Aotearoa, the persistent briefness of being human, and his second enduring love, the ocean.
Ankh’s debut full poetry collection, The Water Engine, was published by Femme Salvé Books (an imprint of Animal Heart Press) in November 2021:
https://femmesalvebooks.net/the-water-engine-by-ankh-spice/
Ankh also has editing roles at Icefloe Press and Barren Magazine.
Microcosm
Night slews in, slowdark inks the pond
Hine-nui-te-pō’s fingers stir giddy a constellation
of gentled waterbeetles
In twitching orbit, podfoil bodies surf
swells of silver equations, arrayed
antennae quivering for any edges to the endless
Even the wingless will fling themselves at new suns
jetting vapour at dawn
to escape this steady drowning
Originally published in Black Bough poetry's
Apollo 11 'Lux Aeterna' edition
Southern Cross(ing)
To our bones, we’re sailors
your castoff ancestors and mine
greedy for the long horizons
Black water licks the hull, paua-tongue velvet
Sacks fill, the shucking knife flashes an arc, the sky stabbed
to welling jewels of broken nacre
And up there, the crux of it all, those four bullroaring stars
Haere mai, their pointer song a hook
tugging south the waka, laden with stories
of silver fish, and earth so rich for growing
Originally published in Black Bough poetry's
Apollo 11 'Lux Aeterna' edition. Pushcart Prize nominated.
Beltsong
Old dustblood Pluto ring-a-rosies
with lumpen children - Nix and Styx,
twin rocky griefs
and frozen motes
who once-were-worlds
Lobed trench deep, the Planitia heart
pangs ion-fection red
at every trip and fall
Star-shot bodies
grind pretty sparks for wishing
and every earthkid asks to fly
Originally published in Black Bough poetry's
Apollo 11 'Lux Aeterna' edition
Three moon haiku
Warmed eyepiece, and there
she looms - a round gasp, perfect
as our seeking urge
She rises early
wearing daybirds for lashes
shy of the bright sea
New struck, a coin held
aloft by fingers of cloud
mirroring the forge
Originally published in Black Bough Poetry's
Magnificent Desolation haiku edition
Fallback (throwback)
Clifftop rocks, sharped by southerlies
bruise my brave, bared winterings-over
A pretty wind insists my hair to kitestrings, toes scatter
small scree, bouncing lust for the fall
into the farbelow bay – once caldera, now again
eager cradle, rocking full of soft blanket-blue
call to the void, you said, but I hear only gulls, urging oh, go, go
one more step and gravity loosens her fist
I unravel – apeswing, quickening shrew, nothing
but open gills falling back to the breathing water
Originally published in Black Bough poetry's Divine Darkness
Solastalgia
Half-done sun flares the water, light lancing clear depths
beneath an ape who swims these days for the joy of it
and a body’s old map uncreases, reading happy accidents aloud
Tuck proud thumbs, and hands recall easy the flipper in the bone
and that they ruddered for a living, five million years gone
And below, a starling rush of rays murmurs round a mountain
too sudden for their species’ long atlas, quaked up overnight,
five thousand years gone
And above, a shoal of swifts, arrows shot true
from their strings, zip the ghost-tree targets
of their hatching grove, felled overnight, five years gone
And that half-done sun is warm on anything like shoulders
for another 5 billion strokes or so, and the wind picks up cool now
and the clouds flickerframe —play at peaks
and valleys, beasts and branches—
then wisp gone.
Who doesn’t love a blank,
blue
sky
Originally published in Deep Time: Volume 1
Last chance to settle
On this long shard, we tiltwalk our builds and burials.
Even low ground here is eyrie, each rock the poke
of sea-hid volcanoes – every scaffold
is a drowning. Squid-haunted rebar, whale-groaned cellars, ghostwater
of the Eocene – most of an island is a body trailing below a flood.
Our small dry bones
are surface detail, the very oldest shallow-shook in hot iron sand, tapu
just seven scant centuries. The sea unsacreds us easily, all our smooths
and roughs, our clingings-on
to barely-unmolten peaks – wild teeth that cut bite early, fanging
the bright thin air above the sweet broad plate
of Gondwanamama, easier geographies still unweaned. And we,
we hungry water-skimmers, we skeletons-in-waiting – left her alone
straining barely above the aching blue. When finally we landed
so late, so heavy
on this last unfooted earth, how she trembled, now
how she holds her breath.
Originally published in Deep Time Volume 1
Glacial body
Under magnification, human bone alive
is skimmed aurora, and the fracture a cliff
of wind-cut ice. To snap up the blue hum
of a glacier, the human eye crackles focus
and there we lie, glow laid bare to the aeon-blade
flensed of our cushion dirt. The owner of this bone
will survive the moraine, fallen deep
to the chill dark of chemical sleep, while the rill of his pulse
quivers that brutal cliff and complicates the fix
and in the dark the ice too is moving to the wiles
of its own slow will, vitals steady.
We think it unconscious. We think it dead.
They say I am lucky to shiver awake, but luck would mean forgetting
old bones have no colour at all – lost airless, pressed lightless
Originally published in Deep Time Volume 1
Foretelling
Lost sanity of sun above, a squatting,
swollen rind of blood. Below, the furnace cooled
of rending fire we bridled, rode to death, and sank
that darkest horseman’s waste to depth.
What’s left of life, it creeps the ooze
at pressure, rolling once-upon-
an-eye, an old burst pearl, its glow rekindled by a spill.
When chains of monsters are all born
again, what chilly omens flood divine
from such a poisoned well.
Originally published in Deep Time Volume 2
Baltic amber
One bead, singing warmth – small palmed weight
gravid with 44 million years
My eye strokes the long blink of a slow life, tender
tastings of long-gone light
eaten into yourself by open-mouthed leaves
your blood, honey your feet, divining water
your crown, greened
by a young and frivolous sun
All the time in the world
to play a forest
down to its glow
Originally published in Deep Time Volume 2
To be continued... in part II
Testimony of Ankh's debut collection - 'The Water Engine' with Femme Salvé Books in November 2021:
https://femmesalvebooks.net/the-water-engine-by-ankh-spice
“In this comprehensive and mighty debut collection, The Water Engine, Ankh Spice stands shoulder to shoulder with poets, such as Les Murray, e.e. cummings, Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas in breaking and remaking language to transport the reader to visionary landscapes, mind-altering terrain and as-yet unarticulated, unchartered emotional territories. Many of the poems are elegies for the “wounded ape” in us all and there are truly haunting, if not harrowing, moments in this work, the “long voyages back to darkness” where mental health and life’s adversities are examined forensically, a disorder of the senses that is as disturbing as it is mesmerising. Though we are “ghosts in waiting”, heard as “a constant howl” from space, Spice dazzles us with the “quartz pricked glitter” of his vivid and imagery. The Water Engine deserves to be a seminal poetic text of our generation.”
Matthew M. C. Smith author of Origin: 21 Poems and editor, Black Bough Poetry.
"I think I write poetry mostly as an act of translation. Language used flexibly is a broadcast from one world to another; from the private, internal landscape inside all our envelopes, out into a tangible, public space where the other humans are getting by. Or a multi-sensory snapshot of a moment or feeling taken by one brain, popped into a viewable album. The most beautiful part about that is that any viewer brings their own experiences and senses to bear when they’re regarding a work. In this way we get to deeply connect with that unknowable ‘darkened boxness’ of other human beings, via this frankly mad system of marks on a page or hoots from the mouth. I experience, I write, you read, you experience. Magic!"
Ankh Spice, November 2021.
Ankh's work has been published prolifically with Black Bough Poetry, so much so that we are serialising this feature in a part I and part II. Ankh has been a Guest Reader for the Deep Time anthology in 2020 with an outstanding contribution as Guest Reader and with his own work in those volumes.
Ankh has been host of #TopTweetTuesday twice and shortlisted and Highly Commended in the #BBmicro competitions. It's impossible to fully capture Ankh's contribution as a creative to the writing community and his outstanding support of other writers across the world, bringing energy, unity and the championing of rights in deeply challenging, uncertain times.
It's amazing to now see much of his work collected in one volume, The Water Engine with Femme Salvé Books . Read our testimony of the book at the bottom of this feature, which comes highly recommended!
Links:
https://www.facebook.com/AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-448322296
Iamb: https://www.iambapoet.com/ankh-spice
The Poetry Archive: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/wordview-2020-new-cloth/ more.