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Poetry

Piet Nieuwland

Volume: 

3

2019-04-01

Issue:

2

And yolo doves 

Aroha mai, aroha atu – love received, love given 

For millenia, humans altered the earth’s surface 

Its’ hot clays furrowed in ceremonial signatures 

These phenomena, a pyxis navigating to starry crosses 

Our souls at the zenith of superstrings 

Calm on the surface, beauty in slowness beneath 

With toiling cloud bellies ripped 

Over deep sapphire 

First petal’s, then cool rain 

On the river flute

Straddling the bells of time 

The land a full breast dressed in shrouds 

Wings a-flight to memories gardens 

In the piazza of our hearts 

White swans at a black obelisk 

And yellow doves 



Glissades in glissando (a series of three poems)


Sattva guna (mode of goodness) 

Over temples of basalt 

Where the music clots like blood 

The albatross, prince of clouds 

Senses hybrids of gravity, 

Exabytes of oligonucleotides 

In cretaceous stratigraphies 

And from nga schiant, the cleft 

Waterfalls of kisses 

Your piquant saliva 

La mezzaluna scende, 

the half-moon shivers



Samara (cycle of repeated birth and death) 

Mud, the ash plumages of Tongariro 

Flows through forests of symbolic logic 

Through modern modem clouds 

And the stretched wavelengths of Irridavan 

To where the estuary opens 

On a shining day, 

When the nectar of our mouths 

Like surges of lava 

Are the ambitious smiles 

of L Anguilla, tuna, the eel



Raja guna (mode of passion) 

From anomalies in the allocthon 

And their mutant electromagnetics 

Arises the grand prismatic spring 

A shrine of rivers 

Drowned in kisses of silk 

And the perfumes of memory 

Nga abbaglio, dazzlement of words are blood 

Like Ill suo rosso, soft red cresent 

And romantic clouds of the ten septillion star systems 

in the universe, tonight



Ruxandra 

Ruxandra of the crescents and ridgelines 

Camouflaged under a skin of glass 

The earthquake lifts your skirts 

Touches flowing through the land of fragments 

A tacit kiss, an endless thirst 

Harem of stars radiant 

As pearls of your smiles 

Below the cloud base 

The gravity of bodies reducing entropy 

Beyond 

The ultra-violets of your eyes



At Puwera 

Albatrosses feed on furious seismic fires here 

Epiphyte laden kauri recall tuatara dreaming 

This whare tupuna is a gypsum cube 

Its molten window glass flows like rain 

The skies fuse from heaving cumulo incandescent 

I am Ngati Nuevo Zeelanidae var. maungakarameaensis 

My moko, carved into the claystone hills

About the Poet

Piet Nieuwland is trained as a forester and worked as a conservation strategist in northern Aotearoa/New Zealand. His poems and flash fiction have been published in numerous print and online journals including in New Zealand (Landfall, Geometry, Brief and Takahe), Australia (Pure Slush, Otoliths and Cordite), Canada (RevuePost), United States of America (Atlanta Review, Blue Fifth Review, Mojave River Review, Lunch Ticket and Sky Island Journal) and India (Sonic Boom). He is managing editor of Fast Fibres Poetry, performs regularly, and reviews poetry for Landfall and Takahe. Website: https://pietnieuwland.simplesite.com/

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