Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
The Garden, One Morning In Early Summer, poem by Anita Arlov.
The Garden,
One Morning In Early Summer
a garden is intimate and exotic at once
like the two end-piers of a bridge:
separate, but connected
wild jasmine is the first pollinator charm,
tumbling like sweet half-dressed sex
from gate to garden
the glory of the Indian chestnut –
her massed canopy of pink standing panicles
freighted with bees – is seeded in me
like my childhood Christmas tree,
likewise pegged with slim candles,
lit after nightfall and let to burn briefly
while we looked on in wonder
in a minute’s shower
bright purple brackets of queen’s wreath
drop their loosest flowers, hundreds of them,
perfect as paper lookalikes.
I fill sachets of petal confetti
for my niece’s garden wedding, soon
a brown blackbird strides out
managerially
to a wet glisten
in the half-bowl of an avocado skin
the kik-kik-kik-kik
coming from the power line
is Kingfisher, come back to his honeycomby
nest cave in the phoenix trunk
tree sparrows rim the bird bath
dipping to sip like wind-up
perpetual motion toys
two pīwakawaka flit above the sprawling fig tree,
gorging on the tiny drosophila flies hover-
ing over the fattest large-as-lemons figs,
the ones easing their seams out,
breaking into smiles
© Anita Arlov
Anita Arlov is the child of Croatian parents displaced after WW2. She lives in Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland. She writes poems and very short prose, hosts workshops and occasionally judges short form fiction. Anita grew up enjoying the cadence of language but didn’t begin writing till mid-life in response to the Canterbury earthquake in 2011. Anita has won the Divine Muses Poetry Competition, the NZ Flash Fiction Competition and has placed second in the Bath Flash Fiction Competition. She is widely anthologised, including Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa/New Zealand; Broadsheet; New Flash Fiction Review; takahē magazine; Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. She convened a team that ran the NZ Poetry Conference & Festival, a successful three-day celebration of all things poetry including vispo, wordcore, sung poems, cine-poetics and workshops, involving 200 poets and arts activists. For ten years she managed popular spoken word event Inside Out Open Mic for Writers. In 2022 she was selected an Ockham Collective Arts Resident.
Kia ora – o such a sumptuous, evocative, wonderful poem Anita! So uplifting to see and read this, reminding me of your own lovely garden too. Much love and all the best with your writing!