Poetic Subjects

(After Sei Shōnagon and Rebecca Lindenberg). A list poem, inspired by 9th century poet and courtier Shōnagon. The cafe referenced is the one and only Maranui Cafe: a worthy subject of poetry.

Hill settlements tumbling seaward: Pōneke, Ōhinehou, Ōtepoti. The blurred blue line of the horizon. Other people’s poems. The rhizomatic structures of kelp forests. What to bring to a potluck. Seichan says we’re always writing a version of the same story. For me, it’s always dusk. 

Dark harbours. The tang of fresh-cut feijoa. Kawakawa. Remembering the dead when doing menial tasks like sweeping the hearth, digging potatoes, laundry.  The communal maternity roosts of the long-tailed bat. How the wingbeat of kererū sounds like a hundred paper fans, opening 

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The satisfactory snap of sheets on a rotary clothesline in a Nor’west wind. Tī kouka: the world’s largest lily. Places where the skin is thin: Samhain, shins, ankles,  your clavicule. Contranyms: ravel, bound, quite, cleave, buckle. A child on your hip, a 12 pack under one arm or carrying a gun: how this changes your gait. How walnuts look like tiny brains. The way your smile just beams. 

The strange acuity of predictive-text fails: Shall we go to the pub for a riot? Take a right onto a dirt road then weep left. Let’s meet at Cafe Narcoti. 

Pūriri: the tree, the moth, their symbiosis. How it’s so hard to say anything new about eyes, snow, the moon. Love. Pages. Layers. Sharpening knives. Falling downstairs. All the theatre darlings at the bar on opening night saying break some legs

A version of this poem is published in TEXT journal, Vol. 29 Issue 1 2025.