Fast Fibres Poetry 7
2020

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Featured poetry

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Follow the Yellow Froth Road

Twin Dorothy’s - good Otago girls

pump their Middlemarch thighs up Ninety Mile Beach

and are soon just specks in the distance

Three tourist buses fly by waving hands and then nothing

except rumpty waves driven in on the roaring forty

this is no Kansas

I hunker down into a head wind past a rusted wreck

and wonder if this is where the Tin Man

met his water loo - or did he just morph with the times?

Is that Warner’s Milk Bottle Man striding out there on the white caps?

I see no sign of the Straw Man and hope he understands

this is not the weather for that sort of behaviour

Soft sand glues my tyres to this part of the planet

the tide climbs up the beach and now I must push my bike

uphill on this flat endless sand

Saint David waits for me wearing his lion’s heart

on the outside of his zipped up parka

and together we walk the final miles to Te Paki

We make North Cape whipped up in freezing wind

and should a tornado try to take us away to Kansas

I would hold onto this raw cathedral with bleeding fingernails

Rawene Eats Holes

Rawene eats holes in the piles under a café

that serves good coffee

lapping as the ferry comes and goes

while flattened bottles reflect the greens and blues

of art felt keepsakes

I seek out the bee and bee above the Taylor’s shop

rich fabrics beckon from the gloom

recessed on a window ledge

rusted scissor hands lie ready

old layers are cut away

Worn steps tell of treads gone before

floors creak the purity of straight grained kauri

and tonight I will sleep deeply

anchored to a harbour

that quietly replenishes