Month: September 2020

I am stranded on the river bank
Shackled by the hope
That this will be the moment
The fish will fill my boat.

the morepork in silent flight
is a dark shadow dropping
from the tree, silhouetted
for a brief moment in the
light from the window,
brushes my shoulder, then
is lost to the darkness
from whence it came.

This mountain, this woman
Who sleeps below the sky,
Who lies above the river
In the dying of the sunlight.

How did I miss the word on the page?
Was it the heaviness of my eyes
Or the fury of the moment or the rage
That slumbered in the glass sky.

He turns the earth with his shovel
And then ploughs it with his hoe
He grubs a trench, centimeters deep
And plants a row of potatoes.

Here, within the glow of the flame,
there is no one a stranger, no one
without a seat at the fire, no one
who lacks a welcome extended;
here, with the beat of each heart,
we are both friend and stranger.

And the lights were turned down low
with faces in the fire light aglow,
we were one with those we didn’t know
and we learnt to sing the songs we sung
each of us speaking in that other tongue.