One of My Baxter Poems

(from Moth Hour)

 

Coming down off the spine of the Botanical Gardens

onto the green flank of the dragon, shadows arch

 

under my feet. In the dell below, the shell-shaped stage

is strewn with red Camelias. November 

 

and across the valley on the dense dark Tinakori hill

houses begin to light up like Guy Fawkes. 

 

At the top of Patanga Crescent the pared-down villa

trembles with young men thinking,

 

pens lost in the wide sleeves of their dead uncles.

They are ecstatic and do everything extravagantly

 

in the last light: read, drink, fuck.

On the windowsill – a stone, leaf, a twig with buds,

 

and the black cat left behind mewling by the old lady

now in the Home of Compassion. No change.

 

©Anne Kennedy

 

Anne Kennedy’s new novel The Ice Shelf is due from VUP in October. She teaches writing at Manukau Institute of Technology.