LOOKING DOWN INTO THE PROMISED LAND

 

the place that I will

never go

no soft landing

if I jumped

no gazing back

to where a lover

turns to salt

small indentations

in the dust

in which my toes are curled

it’s just and only just

desire holds me up aloft

and thus that I am stopped

and shall not leap

down to the land below

but if I did

then I would leave behind

these curlings of the toes

like letters in the sand

where my lover

turned to dust

and I did not look back

desire for me was

no soft landing

in a place

that I will never go

the promised land

 

©Murray Edmond

 

Born, Hamilton, 1949. Home: Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Poet (14 books, most recent Shaggy Magpie Songs, 2015); critic (most recent Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing, 2014) dramatist and fiction writer (most recent, Strait Men and Other Tales, 2015); editor, Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics;  dramaturge (most recent Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis’s Welcome to the Murder House, Wellington May-June 2018 and Naomi Bartley’s Te Waka Huia, Basement Matariki season July 2018) and director (Len Lye: the Opera, Auckland, 2012).