A sickle sun

Tall swish & flicker                     
      all scent & silver        

among eucalypts
      on New Year’s Day   

this clean intoxication
      astringent paring

of a sickle sun
      that sloughs old skin

as easy-peel yesterdays
      crunch underfoot

& swimming
      light with paisley fish

in this linocut grove
     of bright & curve

lets shade slip
      through      & the mind

on aerial silks
      uncurls, rung by

rung to ringing
      impossibly slender

wind-quickened heights
      leaving

for a moment        everything
      but sky & sway.

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.