Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three November-December 2024
Aotearoa Poets and Writers Special Edition
We are the art in the art museum, poems by Gillian Roach.
We are the art in the art museum
At the entrance
to Teshima Art Museum
we scatter like muffled marbles.
Two people sit dead centre
uniform in crisp white shirts
black cropped pants.
Fraternal twins? Mirror lovers?
Each watch a different pool
at the opposite end
of the sphere. They look
photoshopped. A glob
of water holds tension
at my feet. A hanging
thread stirs. An ant
writes black across
the smooth concrete.
Kevin finds action. Quick
droplets that coalesce
and run to a natural
depression. Yah! A child
enters and is summarily
hushed. His grandfather
walks through a puddle
and time ceases until puzzled
he shakes his socked foot.
Two girls in lace, linked
at the elbows, dance
across a patch of sun.
Crashing laughter
dies away to the ubiquity
of birdsong. The space
fits the top of my skull
exactly. I grow around it
I take it away. The art
museum is the art in me.
Ant, thread, twins. Ideas
nudge closer to a pool.
A man tramples through
surprised by sensation.
Greendreaming
Cycle all night in deep
bush ponga ferns
startlegreen
against heavy sky
filtered sunlight filigree
velvet moss lanes
cutthrough
by isolated men in harsh
conditions for extraction
Tumble on repeat
alone on a track beyond
my skill level
humblebruised
no option to quit
like progressing
down a birth canal
reborn vulnerable and pure
threshed and flayed
Fall from the bike all night
wheel trapped in sandy rut
boggy moraine
cartwheeling slow back over
stalled front
boltawake
at cliff edge or tree looming
adrenaline singing doom
singing failure and pain
until the return to now
feather pillow fresh washed
sheets
eyelids shuttering
All the greens beyond
capture to memory or phone
dreaming to be seen
before this land
brownshrivels
in coming centuries of heat
© Gillian Swain
Napier poet Gillian Roach won the NEW VOICES – Emerging Poets Competition 2018 and was awarded runner-up in the The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems in 2018 and 2019. She has been published in Landfall, Takahē and the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook.