Rhondda Greig

 Rhondda Greig is a New Zealand artist and writer living in Scotland and currently Artist-in-Residence at the University of Aberdeen. Eavesdropping with Angels, her first published poetry book, is a journal of grief and early widowhood following the unexpected death of her husband and fellow artist. Coming to live in Scotland provokes a quite different experience. This is the land her forbears vacated and never returned to. There are new words to find for the telling of it.

Poems

• Thursday
• There
• Passing
• All Men Are You
• When A Man
• Winter Upstairs
• Summers Last Day

 

THURSDAY Fine Wellington Thursday September prepared Harbour steering the car over hills, ledges leased for ease, these hills then the grass cruise home to hand wash the day still coming Pantry doors cutting The kitchen red And voices One turning Blue leaping sorry In a uniform Waiting For the sorry Of this morning In Kyoto You dead, he said Return to top

 

THERE The rain changes not its mizzle patterns Hard to be convinced past the window you are not here Standing I can’t see you dead But lying close to your bones I know the chalk phalanges wrapped in silk The flat patella under the totara tree Return to top

 

PASSING We passed each other on the stairs this morning Both knew you should not be here But you slipped through easy telling a story of a parcel and the post office of goods desperately Undestinated of how you solved the problem Bringing fire to burn in my winter pockets Fever rearranges us intimate on the stairs Return to top

 

ALL MEN ARE YOU A man steps off the pavement onto Salamanca Road It isn’t you A man flips a parking meter It isn’t you A man guides elbows round a corner on Lambton Quay It isn’t you A man in a parliament suit folding decisions glancing past his wife his beautiful hand laid along his leg It isn’t you A man in underpants in the Listener ad A man driving a tractor in the rain reading his poems in a pulpit sighting a spirit level All men are you but can they clean their teeth as delicately Return to top

 

WHEN A MAN When a boy you performed magic On stage once, Johnsonville 1952 in an oversize topcoat with stolen spoons everyone laughing at your chaste illusions. When a man you had a hot-air balloon floated over your introspection into the Wairarapa sun. You were always practising to disappear Should we be surprised the impeccable Asiatic exit Return to top

 

WINTER UPSTAIRS A braeburn apple for lunch So hard I bit to the core of May Swallowed chunks of sun stretching frost to noon Winter skinned the room with wax chewed pips runnels of crisp dribbling crimson down wrists Out the window Mohair skies dried golden jerseys I was full of fresh Return to top

 

SUMMERS LAST DAY Wairarapa Lie inside blue and hum the borage sleep to bees Flick bits of ripe sky into the cranberries Listen to the tractor distance eating silage while lavender wasps the sting of another season There is no wind A blow-fly bottles through the windows and summer stripes in and out fat with gold decisions Just sit in the velvet skin of knowing this time before and close the rapture zip ready for autumn Return to top