My daughter returns

 

I meet her in a hotel carpark

separated by traffic cones,

call an austere hello

across a conveyance of air

where anything transmittable

falls to the ground,

resist the urge

to sink to my knees

with the want to hug and hold

one who is afterall a measure of me,

let her go quietly

to the quarantined room,

make the lonesome drive

down the unlit road

where the only ease

is the silky moon

settling a lightness

on the surrounding sky

above the island rising

mountainous from the sea

hugging in comfort

what looks to me

like the broad shoulder

of the horizon.

 

Janet Newman

 

 

Janet Newman is based in Horowhenua. She has a PhD in creative writing from Massey University for her thesis entitled: “Imagining Ecologies: Traditions of Ecopoetry in Aotearoa New Zealand.” Her poetry collection Unseasoned Campaigner was a runner up in the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award and will be published by Otago University Press next year. She was the winner of the 2017 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, the 2015 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, and the 2014 and 2016 Journal of New Zealand Literature Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies.