
Listed by Duotrope
a peer-reviewed quarterly journal on literature
E-ISSN 2457-0265
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/