The Friday Poem: ‘Field-notes: Midsummer, 9pm, walking barefoot in the reserve after a storm, the sky still light, the city strung out across backs of the hills’ by Niamh Hollis-Locke
A new poem by Niamh Hollis-Locke.
Field-notes: Midsummer, 9pm, walking barefoot in the reserve after a storm, the sky still light, the city strung out across backs of the hills
Dunes of last week’s cut grass
washed downslope against the bracken,
drifts of pale wet stems
rotting into one another,
in to one great wave
/ the tidesound of the road / the sweet milkscent of hay /
No bugs this evening.
Not because there are none,
Not because they are leaving us
alone – they have all been
rained out of the air,
they are hiding in the long grass
they are biding their time in the dark earth with the stones
and the gas mains
and other things taken for granted.
Spraypaint on a treetrunk luminous
in the half-dark. A scatter of moths around the floodlamps
over the astroturf.
Every night I pretend I do not hear the way
the forest overflows with silence,
the sound of absent indicator species
violent, a blade. Underfoot the dirt still
warm as flesh.
/ one plane in the pale sky / on the road the cars in their outposts of light /
At night the pylons stride across the land,
endlessly,
endlessly.
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The Friday Poem is edited by Hera Lindsay Bird. Submissions are currently closed.
Niamh Hollis-Locke
Niamh Hollis-Locke was born in Yorkshire but now lives in Pōneke in a small house full of books. Her work has been published widely in Aotearoa, as well as in the UK and Australia, and has been shortlisted for the Ginkgo Prize Best Poem of UK Landscape Award, and the Heroines Festival International Writing Prize. Niamh was the 2023–24 guest editor of Minarets (Compound Press), and often reads submissions and writes reviews for Rat World magazine. She holds slightly too many English degrees, and a Master’s in creative writing specialising in ecofiction. One time she went viral on youtube, which wasn't as fun as it sounds. She can be found on the internet as herself, if you want.
