In case you don’t get to hear Airini Beautrais read at the Auckland Writers Festival this weekend – you can hear her reading a new poem.

 

 

 

Listening

Your love’s a country I will never see

again, a horse that will not take the bit,

a dusty dress I am too fat to fit,

(read: passionate – you’d bust too easily),

a box I’ve locked and then misplaced the key,

a post card I will never receive, a hit

I simply missed, a dog that will not sit,

a prize catch on the hook that wriggles free.

But still I am a wide receiving dish,

listening, listening to signals from the sky

until my ears are thrashed. The cries of birds,

the groans of growing trees, movements of fish,

the rumbling earth, crowd out the sounds that I

am searching for: mute thunder of your words.

© Airini Beautrais

 

 

Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui. Her most recent book of poetry is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (Victoria University Press, 2017). ‘Listening’ is from a work in progress, a narrative sonnet sequence.

 

You can catch Airini at the Auckland Writers Festival:

Friday May 18th 5.30 until 6.30   Homage to the River   Upper NZI Room

Friday May 18th 6 until 7.30   Call on O’Connell    90 minutes literary mayhem on O’Connell Street

Sunday May 20  10.30 – 11.30 The Art of the Poem with James Brown, Choman Hardi and Terese Svoboda.  Upper NZI Room