Hi! May I introduce myself. I am Arthur Bennett and this Wiki contains my complete poetry. The Wiki is named "Elusive" after what I consider to be my best poem and indeed a poem which really exemplifies what my poetry is about. "Elusive" believe it or not came to me in a dream and in the morning I wrote it down before I forgot it. This picture is of course me, in my poetical prime. Whenever you read this, I will of course be older (in fact as I edit this in 2011, much older) and naturally once I was younger. A photograph can freeze one moment of my life. Perhaps this poem can freeze my whole life. The following pages as of the 7th of July 2007 contained 200 of my poems roughly categorized into 21 pages. I would welcome feedback on my poetry. If you like my poems, please pass on the site address to your friends. Then perhaps in the words of my poem Aurochs, "I will not leave this earth unnoticed or unsung".

You can correspond with me via the NOTIFY ME tab above or e-mail me at: shaman@farmside.co.nz

I do have other interests which you are welcome to check out:

My stories for my granddaughter

PlainOldSue - home

My animal anecdote page at

SALAMI - home

My ESOL English page at

CLASSROOM SZE - home

My own bridge system at

ULTRACLUB - home

My pizza oven construction at

PIZZAOVENPROJECT - home

My Bridge Page for Improvers

ARTHURSNOTES - home

I would genuinely love to hear from you.

Myeloma

In memory of my best friend, Quentin Grady


My friend is under attack
By cells of terrorists.
His walls are undermined.
The integrity of his architecture
Is sabotaged.
His vertebrae collapse one by one,
Fold accordionwise
Like the floors of skyscrapers
Falling onto the one below.
Shared memories
Rush out of the basement,
Choking on concrete dust
And mill around aimlessly.
Hope flings itself
Out of a fifty-eighth storey window.
Lifelong friends are trapped
In stairwells and escalators.
When the dust settles
And sniffer dogs can scent no more life
Under slabs of masonry,
Will we find enough to identify him by
At ground zero?

A word about the illustrations. I have tried to make this wiki an example of how you can find the most apposite of images to illustrate poetry. The web is of course a wonderful source of images and many of the images I have used to illustrate my poems have been downloaded. I do not know their copyright status and if any creator of an image objects to the image being used on this, my personal, non profit making site, please contact me and I will remove it straightaway.

If you go to Tane Matua( Page 23 ) you will also find examples of how music can be used to illustrate poetry. This page consists of songs written for a school musical set to well known and hopefully therefore non-copyright tunes. If I have inadvertently breached copyright, please inform me and I shall remove the link immediately.

And my motive for creating this Wikispace of all my poems could be:

Space Ark

I had thought to imprint the code of all my genes
And the pattern of my billion brain cells,
My data bank of memory
Into the crystal lattice of a ship of space,
Into the shielded sarcophagus core of lead.
And to be trebly sure into the junk genes
Of a thermophilic, anaerobe
That would thrive in hard radiation
Or the cold vacuum of space.

Eons hence and light years thither,
The conditions around some distant star
With a planetary Goldilocks zone
Might override the dead man’s handle
And initiate the Lazarus code,
The resurrection of my mortal self.

Perhaps an artificial womb
With its broth of nutrient chemicals
Will grow a full-size body, an upgrade,
The deluxe model of what I might have been.

The unwrit page of my brain, the template blank
Will not be formatted with experience,
But burnt with all the knowledge,
Arrogance and prejudice of my former self.

Perhaps it would be better to consign
The anthology of my thoughts
To the tender mercies of the world wide web,
The unfathomable depths of cyber space.

Maybe in electronic catacombs
My memes will linger like restless ghosts.
Or perhaps some casual defrag will scatter them
Like the atoms of my body to the four winds.

Perhaps in the twinkle of a virtual eye,
I will become unreadable and lost
Where no search engine ever looks
And shrivel like a pot plant in a dark room.
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Index of Titles