Niamh Hollis-Locke
5pm on mt vic
or, Somehow this one’s about Christchurch too
Summit, and the city
unfolds itself;
the hill that you live behind,
the orange tile roof of the house
still new to me,
the university on its spur, lazy;
of my life half a decade of time.
In central, murmurations –
starlings shatter then reform,
like magnetism,
like gravity,
diving through nothingness,
through Lambton’s glass and concrete dusk,
all things together, breathtakingly whole.
Then, southwards;
ridges tumble over each other
and in the heat the gorse is blooming,
staccato pepper scent,
slope after slope catching yellow flame.
Between them, deeper grey,
Pacific’s vastness, agoraphobic breadth,
and if I squint I can almost pretend that through the bruise of distance I can see
the mountains,
the other island’s spine, its fault-line nervous system
tracking south, toward that other city
which I no longer know.
Out by Miramar, planes bargain with gravity,
pulling people skywards to other places, lives,
and for the first time,
watching them,
I feel no longing
for elsewhere.
Here, Now –
the present
is enough.
Niamh Hollis-Locke is a Wellington-based tea-drinker, museum-rat, and general nuisance. She holds a BA(Hons) from VUW, and is currently studying towards her Masters in Creative Writing at Massey University. She really ought to be working on her thesis, but has been writing this instead.