Title: Sport 10

Editor: Fergus Barrowman

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, May 1993, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 10: Autumn 1993

♣ Dinah Hawken

page 41

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.

page 42

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

page 43

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