The luminous blue

You will find it in the icy sky of daybreak
above the marine light of waves
in the pages of the books of the dead
poets: Vincent who some would call
Voss, Lauris, Brian, Glover and Campbell,
I loved them all more or less
the pub and the drinks, the banter
until evening and swearing blue murder
blue, the word blue    although to read
them you could be forgiven for thinking
it is a word they couldn’t bring themselves
to use, as if every day blue was too ordinary
a betrayal of the imagination, a carpet
of flowers to trample, yet if you search deep
in the end you will find it, the irresistible
blue rain     beyond the blue   and round
the lake so blue    the visible blue dark
they came to it sooner or later.
                                          You will find
it too in the dark luminosity of navy
on the mountain ranges at nightfall.

Fiona Kidman

 Fiona Kidman has been writing for the past sixty or so years, her life’s vocation. Her work includes fiction, poetry and memoir, although for a long time her income came from screen writing. Her work has been published internationally and she has received a number of prizes, most recently the Jann Medlicott Ockham new Zealand Book Award for Fiction for This Mortal Boy. Her latest publication is The Midnight Plane: Selected and New Poems (Otago University Press 2025). She is a Patron of the New Zealand Poetry Society and of the Randell Cottage Writers Trust.