Yellow & Blue

 

Night     and I go to frangipani trees
to locate what drifts through our open windows
     to undo the mystery that shakes the membrane
between worlds. Creamy the petals and yellow the heart.

I pick the one flower I can reach and come down off my toes into
a kind of falling through  
hot soles on black grass
and the brute broken notes
of war     

a frightened scudding
fall, the cane toad’s icy stare
I skitter up floating steps and through
the door

morning floods the lowlands and the levels, but not the eucalypts on the rise
           not their soft blue exhalation
            of flammable oils

 

Lynn Davidson

 

Lynn Davidson’s latest poetry collection Islander was published by Shearsman Books, Bristol,  and Victoria University Press, Wellington, in 2019. Lynn had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency in 2016.  She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020, and was 2021 Randell Cottage Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence.