A VAST QUANTITY OF EARTH
I take the long way home and walk past the wall again
It is a very beautiful thing see the way it arches
its back over the rise
Sighs into the side of the hill red dirt meeting itself
↓
Here we are again this time there is no wall to be seen
Just a hill taller this time
the northerly catches itself on the summit
One worn track down to the harbour edge
A row of harakeke— a solo kōtare—
someone in the distance digging a hole
↓
This brick has a fingerprint in it. This one— an arrow
and another and another
They point out the places where the time is going
Here, it is a new geological epoch.
Over here it is just last Tuesday.
↓
It is proverbial in its perfect roundness
The bricks hold up the hill ← the hill holds up the bricks
The hill from which the bricks came →
the bricks from which the hill rises
Each mark in the fired clay
Is a tally
I was here ↓ I was here ↑ I was here
MEGALITH
One evening I perform a bridge, hands and feet
planted wide and flat and stomach
pushed out in a taut curvature
I stay there until I become good and solid—
a dolmen
/
In time mosses live on me
and a string of girls, hand in hand, make their way
up the hill
and sit under my sheltering back
to watch the sun set behind the forest
/
I weep in places, and more people come, and weep too
They give me things bodies wrapped in hides
sheaths of wheat, barley, bay,
sometimes handfuls of ash
sometimes a goat,
blood cowped over my stones and bare dirt
/
When I begin to cramp and fracture
with the weight of standing
and the swallows nesting in the lichenous crevice
of my armpit go south again,
I finally give in,
let the time speed over my cragged surfaces
and push me down into the wet moss cradle
until I am soaked and soft and new.
Loretta Riach is twenty-two, an artist, and a student, living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Some of their poetry can be found in Starling, and some of their art can be found on their website.
