Poetry

At Sagaing

A pagoda on the Irrawaddy delta

Listens to the sky

Blue pandemonium

The sweet orange tastes

Kisses of the sun

Heart, jewel, bloom, star

Falcon curves soar

Over mirrored black swans

The armada of clouds in the one sky

There is only one, the air, thinking it,

Seeing it all, the blurring dark

Greens, as time breaks over the

Map of the world, clean bright moon

In the river, its semaphore articulate

On deeper water

This interglacial

Fragile as dew

Points of No Return

Mist encircles the dispassionate hills

A yarn spreads to daybreak edge on water

The kissing minutes entangle

On the long body of the beach

With a melancholic moon currents rub through

Before her he stood, without any verbs

Inhabiting a shape at the point of departure

But with monsoons of theorems

On the quintic root of light

De-facto acrobats in a syncretic shelter

The glance pianissimo at ocean lifting

Wave fall in the heart of not silence

Not quiet, the popular sky occupied

By pliable shimmer-shade shifts across

Into a post carboniferous history when we say

What is and what it is not, what could be

And what is possible, what is possible here

On this shoreline what does matter

For the children who are going

To the future of their children

And not coming back

Tumbling down over the dunes we see

Dance, frisking about in layers of warm

Shallows shrieking

Undercurrent

It’s raining on basalt city, Auckland,

Sydney, New York, Mumbai too

The grey circumferential continua disappear

And at Ahipara painted black

Are people at the edge of perception

Like moteatea for soldiers of Passchendaele

The language is never innocent

We are poets and the poet’s experience

In the historic continuum eternity is everywhere

The future keeps arriving, demands an urgent subversion

In the performance of leaf and shadow

That disappears into the space before memory

Before silence knows

It has flesh blood and name

When light passing through crystal

Lands on a page

Defines a defragmented identity

An agitation of the technocratic priesthood

A new condition of scientific reductionists

Destabilising information marketers

Their ownership of discourse

The language never innocent

The Sky Explodes

Into natural

Sound-bytes, shattering pulses awaken

Cumulus into ultra-cumulo nimbus

Hot, now cool

Showerheads blossom, bloom abundant

Lightning tarantellas leap catapult and leap

In a surround sound boom box

Downpipe gush along a plastic

Pacific drum song

Splash, gurgle, rivulet be bop drip drop

Alluvial masterpiece in ying yang-ing

Hydro logical cycles

The eva-poration counter point of rivers

Of air, static discharges electric

In too cloud umbrellas

A vor-textural ambush

Extra Seconds of Light

From the lookout

Bronze bells and jade chimes over twisted pines

Bamboo groves, plum blossoms and ferns frond

Ninety million waves to the sea

A chittering of sparrows and yellowhammers

Songs to the eastern sea

A promise of magnolia blossoms

The faintest fragrance

Arrives over the horizon line, a widening grin

Of mirrors blink, a distant lighthouse flash

A moonless silence

On the hidden parameters of a belief system

Statistics of blood and condition

Dissolution of time in the law of catastrophes

In centrifuges over warm oceans

Off Sri Lanka