Sport 10: Autumn 1993
♣ Dinah Hawken
♣ Dinah Hawken
A New Word
I have a new presence inside me.
You. It is a pale still day.
The tuis are really here,
I have seen them, three of them.
Thrush, tui—which is the most mellifluous?
A word I learned from Phyllis Webb.
'Drunken and amatory, illogical, stoned, mellifluous
journey of the ten lines.' If I could sing
like you, like her, tui, like spring water and
far off a rock falling.
Sunset
Sunsets are for poets and there's not a thing
I can do with this one.
Gulls are careering out of the picture.
A man is thrashing upstream as if he'd kill
for its source. Wind chills my back
as I stand by the estuary which flares
like a glacier on fast forward towards the ocean.
No evening star. No moon.
Strands of gold thrown out
in the silver stream like trash
Floating
The lake is never like glass. It has a soft
top that will always let you in.
It will hold your confident body in its satin hammock.
O let your body be
in ancestral hands. Forget their treachery.
It takes so little—just a flutter
of your arms and legs to lie in splendour
being purely who you are already
preventing death in a state of grace
water fire earth
air
a state of grace preventing death