(After Helen Frankenthaler)
Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers.
Anais Nin
I am thinking about
a cherry guava,
biting the perfumed skin
at its sultan crown,
the sweet white flesh scraped
through my teeth;
verve of golden sunshine.
I am reflecting upon how I always love to be
bathed in heat
beneath light muslin sheets
floating on my elated skin
like clouds—
Warmth swells.
Blush rises on flesh,
throbbing from the sunlit hours.
I am thinking about how
the delicious roundness of the gold-green guava
send out the radiance of your eyes,
two colour-fields of joy
soak-stained with you
and filled with love.
About the author
Leila Lois is a woman of Kurdish and Celtic heritage who has lived most of her life in Aotearoa. Her Kurdish ancestors fled oppression in Iraq in the seventies and her parents moved from London to Aotearoa soon after she was born.She has been living in Naarm since 2018, working as is a dance educator during the day and practising choreography and writing in her free time. Leila has read and written poetry from a young age, loving the way landscape, emotion and memory is distilled in few words. In her poems, Leila explores a personal sense of origin that, like the ocean, binds several landscapes and times, coming back to the idea that a timeless, boundless love pervades through the land.
1 Comment
Lovely images!
Come and eat guavas from our garden in Aotearoa soon!
They are ripe at the moment.