The tree line glows
with citrine dusk,
the way Eucalyptus sap glistens in sunlight
or golden wattle hums with its soft scent.
Raven eyes glint
like river stone
marking the way across these dry grass plains
organ pipes, swelling and blooming with the wind.
The cooled basalt lava
is flood-lit.
Vertical stripes of rock
in the mist of red earth and smokey trees,
rain sticks of sacred geometry,
tall, dreaming stacks above
a sage-green pool.
My Welsh grandmother used to play the organ, every Sunday. The sound of deep devotion.
When first I arrived on this land
I plucked a card showing a slice of rock, forget-me-not blue.
Crumbling delicately at the edges
changing form, rock as mutable as water. Geological time
is supine, slow.
And this reminds me of how
I am a visitor here, just
on my gradual return home.
Cover image by Nick carson at English Wikipedia
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.