| feijoa (Rachel) |
sazxyen
|
We were six and infinity, | 1 |
time was infinity and none, so | 2 |
I rode on your back and | 3 |
we ate fruit off the ground barefoot, | 4 |
whilst | 5 |
like astronauts discovering the gods' secret folds, | 6 |
we pretended we were the only ones who knew | 7 |
Auntie Pauline's pav recipe, | 8 |
and how pohutukawa blossom for Christmas. | 9 |
| |
There were tomato patches and baby rabbits | 10 |
and no business empires, | 11 |
no graph paper or lined pedagogy, | 12 |
no hands that reason instead of listen, | 13 |
no aeroplanes circling parts of the planet | 14 |
I never thought of pretending to discover | 15 |
| |
until one day the Powers that Be decided | 16 |
there were other folds I should inhabit | 17 |
and so sent me instead to this, this land of | 18 |
industrialised dirt and | 19 |
globalised beggars clanging Change | 20 |
..pop, went my feijoa ice cream snowglobe. | 21 |
| |
There were divorces and severings | 22 |
and I lost you somewhere in space, | 23 |
amongst these papers and your autonomy, | 24 |
my busy and your happy. | 25 |
so we let each other disappear | 26 |
into the rest of our kiwi barbeque childhoods | 27 |
| |
But those gods work in disgustingly | 28 |
wondrous and slimy and mad ways, | 29 |
ever bringing infinity back in on itself | 30 |
so that somehow we would emerge from chaos | 31 |
to collide, still barefoot, matching tattoos, | 32 |
scooping feijoa like tomorrow was never willed. | 33 |
| |
seventeen and infinity | 34 |
going on eighteen and six, | 35 |
we ride our batty quarter lives together | 36 |
in wrong hemispheres, but I know | 37 |
we still wear matching dresses somewhere. | 38 |
(comment on this poem) |