Poet captures raw emotions

Wellsford poet Terence O’Neill-Joyce says he has the knack of being in the right place at the right time to see people open up in extraordinary ways as he travels New Zealand and the world.

These revealing moments have been captured in his third book of poems – Aspiration: Tales of the South Pacific & Elsewhere Through the Mists of Time.

One moment relates to an incident in Fiji when Terence was enjoying a drink at a restaurant bar.

A waitress accidentally dropped and smashed a bottle of tequila and couldn’t stop crying. The restaurant owner demanded she pay for the tequila, which turned out to be more than a week’s wages for the impoverished waitress.

Terence slapped his credit card on the bar and insisted he would pay for it. Days later he returned to the restaurant to check on the waitress.

She presented Terence with a gift her mother had made – a plant in a terracotta pot made from marram grass, with tiny seashell flowers taken from her mother’s prized necklace.

The gift inspired the title poem Aspiration and a photograph of the plant adorns the cover of Terence’s book.

“On the one hand, you have the owner of the restaurant being bloody-minded – not being prepared to help this woman – and then two days later you have the mother not holding back and breathing something out, coming out with natural talent – that’s why it’s called  Aspiration,” Terence says.

The first three poems in the book relate to Terence’s experiences at Christchurch mosques, following the massacres that took place there in March.

The son of a Fijian business associate of Terence was at the Al Noor Mosque when the shooting started and managed to escape death by locking himself in a toilet.

Terence later went to Christchurch to support the family.

“I was suddenly absorbed in an Islamic frame. What was I going to do? I just did everything they did.

When they went to the mosque to pray, I went to the mosque to pray,” he says.

Terence recalls the kindness and consideration shown to him – particularly a man who shared his prayer mat as he knelt on a hardwood floor.

Another poem relates to Terence’s experiences at Anzac Day commemorations in Wellsford, where he met two fellow poets from Wellsford Primary School whose poems about the day moved him. The poems of Alyssa Godinagh, 6, and Jason Godinagh, 9, are included in the book.

Terence says he is not an intellectual poet, rather his poetry is “the language of the heart”.

“I’m attuned to music and I’m attuned to poetry. There are things that you can say in poetry that you would not normally say in an essay,” he says.

For a copy of Aspiration email Terence, terenceonj@gmail.com. The cost is $20 including postage.

Book Giveaway

Mahurangi Matters has one copy of Aspiration to give away. To go in the draw for the book, email your contact details to the editor at editor@localmatters.co.nz. Put “Aspiration” in the subject line. The competition closes on Monday, September 30.