The Celestial Press

The Celestial Press We are a secular press in Aotearoa New Zealand. Submissions in English from anyone in the world are welcome.

The Celestial Press [established 2020] is devoted to the best. Moreover (and we shall be fully old-fashioned in this respect), we are devoted to the very notion of the best, where it is understood that “the best” is that extreme of good quality EVERY human ought to have available to them.

10/02/2025

C F HOOD

Mop

As I find my days shorter (I am in my sixties), I am quietened by a force beyond me that reminds: none of us chooses when we live. I am not a naturally retiring person – I have insisted this my whole extremely retired life! I always felt that I was a creature, nascent, waiting for a birth or emergence into a world expectant of redemption. I only have the old myths. When I was young, a child of twelve in fact, I learnt in a kind of communion with the ancients the simple truth, the only knowable truth, that we live to die. Our knowledge is situated in that garden near the gate to the undiscovered country. Dear Montaigne says, don’t ever worry about death, it will teach you everything you need to know just as you need to know it. We can’t talk to death because, as Thomas Mann teaches in THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, death and life are unknowable to one another. They have no language the other can speak. Why then are there ghosts? I do believe in ghosts. C.S. Lewis wondered once whether ghosts weren’t a great deal more common than we might expect. Some days, when we know no faces on the street around us, we are the only living being. Everyone else? The lost souls of beyond our time. Ghosts may come from the future too. The world is in a great movement towards death. It is the business of the diminished that is occurring. William James talks of a secret knowledge – the knowledge that only the pupil of the school building in the field next to the undiscovered country learns. He is pledged to silence. Dear friends? There are some. Humans know they are human because they cry. Why would a machine bother? Please know this as a poem. Poetry is greater than any of us when it is great because it speaks to a bedrock of death. When death is dead, there is no poetry. Who needs poetry?

Craig Hood 2025
[from WHERE IS MY LABRADOR?]

18/01/2025

CHRISTA WEIBEL

Living Room

I do like sport.
The sport of Kings.
Accused, often, that I do not,
I remind that only followers
Know that grown men wept,
The day GREAT SENSATION
Won his third Wellington Cup.
In New Zealand.
There’s a detail to notice.
My father told me this
And I know it to be true.
Since he was one of the weepers.
My mother made us remigrate,
Shortly after,
Back to Germany.
We resumed our preposterous
Exclusion of anything new.
Our sentimentality, anyway,
was a more sinister measure.
A clean but empty
Train. Pay no attention to people
You can see. They don’t see you.
And you don’t see them.
Not really.
Bills will need to be paid.
Some do deals.
And they like land.
You know. I know.
They don’t make it anymore.

Christa Weibel 2025

12/01/2025

C F HOOD

Where is my Labrador?

At some point in my life,
I stepped out of the mirror
and knew the true god.
We are our vanities.
And our pets, indiscreetly.
I came to understand
that what you see is
what you get;
the vague is intentional,
and potent. Trust no one
but be loyal to some.
I lived, once, in a house
that lost the sun in winter.
No comfort, really, to
see it across the valley,
bathing the airport
on crisp July afternoons.
The airport was fun.
We lived, perched high on the hill.
One awful morning
a Boeing, far off,
ran across our
breakfast table window.
Was its take-off held back
by purposed mad pilot,
or just margin for error?
Watching.
Yes, we were watching.
It would be
6 o’clock news.
I ran outside,
yet it roared into the sky.
Play with the dog.
Nice day coming,
thirty years ago.
Toffee nerves,
high on the hill.

Craig Hood 2025
[from WHERE IS MY LABRADOR?]

12/12/2024

ENNIS WILLSON

what are you reading?

cool editor dude,
he is better; we are better
you direct my thoughts,
and give me hurricanes
that i love living through.

my supervisor says i am a genius
you remind me of my duty -
no brilliance comes in the super giant
without mass assuming the inevitable dust
of all the rest of us,
who expand and then explode
for your glory.

i saw the present in sentoga’s dog
i bear him the messenger’s true worthy -
the no-seen, no-read helplesslessnes of
knowing what is and will be.
i give him food although
the lord is prayer no more.

my solace, sanjay, comes by
caring for my dad; my loves are
shortening now, but i am a child
who knows the way is having children.
we reproduce and make things
like the future and the past.
dad and you both say that you met
that i might think to clarity

i am reading as much as i can
when our spring comes,
if it comes,
i will plant lettuce
for greta and her husband’s
new garden.

Ennis Willson 2024

07/12/2024

CHRISTA WEIBEL

Notre Dame Cathedral

Restored,
I shall bite my tongue.
The end of my pencil, actually,
My poetry pencil.
Hundreds of millions
poured in
(they wouldn’t say dripped would they?)
from around
the world to restore it.
i think I have lost
The Upper Case.
No, it’s back.
I have lost my mind?
Xmas time.
You hate Xmas,
Christa,
That’s why we don’t ask you
To the party.
And you give
Those horrible calendars
Out. The year in gore.
Pathology.
I work with
Moral Pathology.
It's all flat screens.

Christa Weibel 2024

01/12/2024

CALIDA VICTORIA MANESH

Appeasement

For in much wisdom
Is much grief.
They who accede to greater wisdom
Must know greater grief.
Do you not tire
Of the stupid
Who create misery?
Those doting dots
Of the banal and the
So what.

My parents agreed to nothing
Other than to reproduce
The same unspeakable,
But mouthable,
Syllables of sycophancy
To the eternal stupid.
Why was I born?

Let the credit for my insight,
My inside brain,
My malignant mind,
Rest with them who came earlier.
The world is not for our kind.
Humans are the godless gods.

I know the ancient ways.
I'd wish them on all of you
Were there any hope or nous
Or way to end this nightmare.
Visions are not for prophets,
They are for the blind who
Never can see the mistakes
Of yesterday.
They repeat them
Endlessly
Today.
God help us all.

Calida Victoria Manesh 2024

Myshkin, 25th November 2025.
24/11/2024

Myshkin, 25th November 2025.

22/11/2024

C F HOOD

Yet I Would Die

Yet I would die for someone,
and if I would die for someone
then I think I would die
for something.

Some idea?
Some passion?
Some outrage?

It’s the unfair
as much as the unseen
that takes me to the stellar
clarity of the shared
genius.
Our day may be done,
perhaps,
but the human being
was a glorious being.

Craig Hood 2024
[from THE FOREBODING]

22/11/2024

SENTOGA BENSON

Have you ever heard a dog howl when it’s done something awful? Like attack a puppy? I have. I am not doing some metaphor. Christa Weibel, I read you, my darling. The actual doesn’t do it for most humans though. Never has for me. When I sleep I dream a lot about being in a city I don’t know. I have my car though and I park it before I walk. I will remember this time where. I mine my fate in dreams. Dreams tell me what I have coming to me. When I am done with the dream, I shall drive home. That is my intention. But my dreams are truthful, don’t you know? I can never find my car. I can never find where I have parked it. Every time. Now stop your figurative driving, why don’t you? I am the dog, silly.

Sentoga Benson 2024

22/11/2024

CHRISTA WEIBEL

I Hate Christmas

The ease of emotion,
is disease of reason.
I have a rhyming yearn.
My little bairn,
Do you hear me?
Do you wear
My Label?
It’s nonsense to say
There’s no way to pay
For murder and misery
And humans in disarray.
If I wink
Will you think?
I hate Christmas
Except when it’s every day.

Christa Weibel 2024

03/11/2024

ENNIS WILLSON

the fifth

cool editor dude
who extols and exacts
my dad says he knew your dad.
you want me to tell
what I know?

harris will win,
and sweep,
unskirting little people
in our great makebelive republic
(leave that in?)
trump has no lee
and there’s gonna be
no third day of gettysburg.
history.

pickett’s charge and the blood
of egotists with all the crooks
who know how to make
little people bleed.
dad says some should hang.

i don’t know. i want to rest
when dad needs to;
that’s all I need and know.

Ennis Willson 2024

30/10/2024

SENTOGA BENSON

Those touchy-feelies give me the creeps. Go on. Hurry up. Out you go. And off they went. They are very creepy types – I mean in the second sense of the word: they’re dawldlers. I had discovered that my mother and my father were, performatively you might say, not quite what the billing said; not at home anyway. Makeup off; no show actually. Little by little, and into my 3rd year, I was, it felt, six performances a week, with two on Sundays. My run as a solo child ended when I fell out my bedroom window and arose unscathed. In the process my mother died a death of shame as the neighbours nodded their understanding that she was running a bath and had lost sight of me for a moment. I remember feeling the thrill of the sill: attempted su***de at 3! Genius child.

Sentoga Benson 2024

28/10/2024

CHRISTA WEIBEL

Not In My Name

Please, if you have a moment,
would you come in here?
Yes, my office; my room; my place
of worship. I’m sorry to trouble you.
It doesn’t matter what you call it.

All right, if you need to flatter me:
my conscience, where rage runs
rampant and the waters run
higher and higher.
Do you not see,
out my window,
the dam; its cracked concrete?

Metaphor. You think I use a metaphor.
Am I saying something is like something,
the better for you to understand me
or read me? No, I’m not that kind of
poet today.

I’m sad. Oh, I’m sad.
My people did to your people,
not so long ago,
the banal indignity
of mass murder.
And, well, it’s all been said,
hasn’t it?

Has it?

I watched a child
fry in flames, yesterday.
I’ve asked you here
today, not to show you the footage.
No.

I have a thirst, that’s all.
I need you to help me
quench my thirst.
I’ve run out of tears,
but I want to make you cry.

Look. Oh look. For god’s sake,
look, and feel. They have murdered his child.
His child.
Now, please, don’t tell anyone
you saw me like this.
Please don’t.
Please don’t.

Christa Weibel 2024

26/10/2024

SANJAY RICHARD PATEL

Song of the Virtuoso

My nation, your nation,
Neither set apart.
My dream is for brilliance.
The hurts will soon die
If only we awake.
This I sing before you all.
Let genius be our world
And mediocrity, unnerved.
There are exceptional minds
And there is the best.
None will grow weak
When some know to grow tall.
The least are to be proud
To know the humble who are great.
Talent is the beginning of everything.
Talent is the tallow which
Life lights as a candle.
It creates our start.

Sanjay Richard Patel 2024

13/10/2024

CHRISTA WEIBEL

Cookies

The flatterers,
Dostoyevsky had something to say,
Didn’t he? Insipid profusions
Of praise, as contracted
By the deprived of talent
And wannabe associates.

I love watching the flies
As they flit past the fronds.
I’m not nice. I laugh.
No one is absurder
Than the desperate
For fame – they drive

In a city of baked books
Where backscratching
Is the currency. Tired mistakes
Caught or lying in shop windows.
The screech of whose brakes?
More tasteless tarts, being delivered.

Christa Weibel 2024

02/10/2024

SANJAY RICHARD PATEL

Sweetheart

Loving you on dark days
Is my solace and my hope.
The broken dreams may craze
My fiscal life - with you, I cope.

Our children came and went
With no solace or goodbyes.
We didn’t know what we’d spent.
Neither wisdom or sighs, left to arise.

Oh my darling, the dawn and the light,
Is their world left to save or to mourn?
Hold my hand, until the night
And feel my touch as if new-born.

Sanjay Richard Patel 2024

29/09/2024

CHRISTA WEIBEL

Mr Larkin

I am supposed to love you
although you never had children.
You were fu**ed up
by mum and dad, yes.
Your words, not mine.
But your kids
were nihilism
and despair.
Twins of sorrow
and booze,
I rather think.
No one tries
harder than the hurt,
not if they want to try.
You have to try,
when you become
a mum or a dad.
Or both.
Love is
a heritable dream.
You were right
about death though.

Christa Weibel 2024

29/09/2024

C F HOOD

Happy Birthday

My table, outside,
was once inside.
There I sat;
here I sit.

Now the wind,
this rising wind,
lifts my pages
and I see the printing,
carboned by the cryptic,
on a cracked face.
The sun I knew,
neither smiles nor scowls;
nor marks my tender vanity.

And these few reams
of timber relic,
sanded by the coming gale,
streamer
like building paper
or bunting.

Craig Hood 2024
[from THE FOREBODING]

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