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Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers April 2023
Making Maps, poems by Trevor M Landers
Making Maps (Awakino Heads)
I want to measure plumb lines
& to chart new continents;
the contours and curvatures of skin
Draw new pleasures onto pliant canvasses;
to dream a little more
To put every fluid ounce of me into the ink which colours the topography of you
Stencilled in pale pinks, mauve, sizzling reds & penitent purples
To have at the command of my fingertips—an empire:
Your bluffs; crevasses, major highways, and roads that lead me onward, imploring;
I want to find flash-flooded rivers that make your tremulous heart race
Find dank doorways in your industrial estates,
luxuriate in long, languid rambles
across the Nape of your neck
To press my face into windowless shops
and to inhale the fragrance that lingers
& to come and know, the splendours of cartography.
Awakino at dusk
Under a veil of drifting mist
sounds of night surcease
sea and air around effuse
in a state of timeless peacefulness
this is Awakino near dusk.
Dusk breaks in bright reflections
Mauve ribbons emblazoned across the sky
burning away the mist
the sea returns rainbow refractions
a thousand fathoms deep
From beyond the black horizon
the ocean roils and writhes
in mottled green confusions
night sweeps in burgling the last light
this is Awakino after dusk.
A thing of inordinate beauty
(Wai-iti Beach)
It was remarkable
the way he put her insecurities to sleep
with all the skill of an old time somnambulist
the way he dived into her opalescent eyes
and starved all her gnawing fears
& tasted all her incalescent dreams
that she had stockpiled in bone marrow
& when you have swum in her oceans
a lake will no longer suffice
everyone else is a pond but you are always the ocean
find a hand in the darkness of a flood
& if there is insufficient light
I propose you & I enter the water.
© Trevor M Landers
Trevor M Landers, MA, MEd, MCW, is the Kauhoe of Mātātuhi Taranaki, the bilingual journal of creative writing servicing his home province of Taranaki. His latest project (with Vaughan Rapatahana and Ngauru Rawiri), Ngā Pūrehu Kapohau: A literary homage to Pātea, Waverley, Waitōtara and districts is due for release in May 2023. A follow up covering the rugged rural communities Eastern Taranaki is planned for 2024. These unpublished poems are drawn from the 2024 collection. He has previously published five volumes of poetry, as well as editing two national anthologies. http://www.matatuhitaranaki.ac.nz/