Growing Advice

At all costs avoid the twisted or winding pathways so often seen in the
small garden situated on the corner where two streets meet.
— THE COMPLETE NEW ZEALAND GARDENER

You can make it work if you’re at all
handy, hunkered and humble. It costs
only rain and the sun’s incandescence (avoid
hatless noons) along with the twisted
complicity of leafy time unwinding.
Bump the wheelbarrow up the pathway,
tread, rake, tease and weed so often
peas will bloom as soon as you’re seen in
flip-flops and crocuses flag your small
vernacular seasons because the garden
is making something of you, situated on
the border of dirt and thumb, the corner
with its stepover wall where two streets
grow neighbourly and flora and fauna meet.

Megan Kitching

Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the 2024 Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Awards and was awarded Best International First Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize 2024. In 2021, Megan was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer in residence.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy wonder stillness of a poem.