Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026
Sounder, poems by David Eggleton.
Sounder
Leviathan breached from shrouded waves
seeks albatross worlds and mislaid moons.
Epiphanies of parrots skim through treetops.
Hoisted up out of the water to blow a guffaw,
whale bulwark goes slapping and wallowing
against plastered sky above submarine chasms.
A wall slides past, on extended gliding flukes,
pursuing the force of a waterboarding mouth,
and the big shadowy tongue speaking volumes.
Bioluminous swizzles bloom in spectral blue.
Lightning forks strike plankton phosphorescence
lifting on a coastal surge of seahorse currents.
The ocean coils are so fluent they drag tree trunks
in their rip far out, then run up a cliff face,
to flip and crash back, swamping beach pebbles.
The bob of a fur seal’s dark head snouts
from bull kelp to ride surf’s whip-crack in.
Sharp winds churn gobbets of foam on sand.
Uncanny Weather
Heaven’s heights resound to waiata.
Cicadas lasso noon’s heat-haze.
A tūī trills like a manic doorbell.
The carpetbagger who parachuted in
is got at with slingshot and pitchfork.
From the rest-home, bring the coffin.
Social exquisites debunk fake Gothic.
The city of car sales pops the lock.
Swimming pools fill with vape smoke.
Fiordland walkers are guided by voices.
Existence goes on in tight-knit places.
Some take to kayaking mountain rapids.
Some run for redemption towards the hills.
Some lunge for oxygen on an icy peak.
A mud-pool wrestler twangs the elastic.
Rugby’s won on the wobbly fields of Chur.
Enter the same old losers and winners,
to explain it all with a chart of the weather.
Kīlauea, Hawai’i
When the akua, Pele, is blowing hot,
garlands of fire garnish her coasts.
Her magma hisses dragon-like,
her red eye-holes blaze flower-bright.
Snow is sprinkled above rainforest,
a canopy crown of white blossom.
Great scroll-works of fern shelter
chandeliers of orchids, beside lava folds
that shine in the wind and sun. Springs
wink and burst with prismatic bubbles.
The volcano smoulders with ashy breath.
Pupualenalena the Dog-spirit whines from a rock,
and ghosts gleam from smoking fissures.
Magma bulges as a black satin mass,
a solid river, a surface weathered and bumpy
but smooth. Break it open, and you see
where taffy lava has hardened into layers;
it splinters, brittle, full of air bubbles.
Now along verges of cracked asphalt
roads around where Kīlauea slumbers,
hanging wisps of dried lava flutter
in the wind to tell the whole island is alive;
and when it stirs again, and fire surges
through vents to plunge into the boiling sea,
sending up multiple plumes of steam,
there will be wave-slaps from other islands;
there will be whales, swimming for dear life.
© David Eggleton
David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He is a former Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and his collection Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in March 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. His poetry collection Lifting the Island was published by Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, California in September 2025.