A poem a day: pasture
Author:
Morgan Bach
Publisher:
Te Herenga Waka University Press
ISBN:
9781776920815
Date Published:
10 August
Pages:
76
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$25.00
Aotearoa celebrates Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day on Friday when poetry will pop up in churches, bookshops, libraries and out on the streets through music, poets sharing an open mic, book launches, poetry walks and more. Here at Kete, we’ve started early with a poem each day this week. pasture is from Morgan Bach’s second collection Middle Youth.
pasture
South of the sea road, in winter, the hills,
folded tight as bundled cloth, appear lit
from within when the sun breaks over the eastern range.
These hills don’t raise the eyes of most in this train
carriage, don’t pull like the view over sea and islands
do—they gather in, they oppose a sense of distance.
So bare, like the intimate places of other
bodies. I cannot pass them without taking in
their bright pasture. I graze on them. This
stretch of un-wild green,
transposed from ideas of other countries, stays clipped
and worked, moulded like a colonial batter. Is it
beautiful in the way a desert is beautiful? Changed from
its old life as ocean or prairie.
On other spines of the coast pasture is giving way,
reverting to scrubby bush, seedlings, nursery cover.
In my lifetime I could see new canopy, hopeful in t
he way a woman just past ‘her peak’,
feeling the prickling freedom of not giving a fuck, glows
with that new power—of those that have been put out to
pasture in the minds of men, who in all our lifetimes
have been the ones to decide.
I raise my eyes to look at them. The common
sight of farmland in this country, stripped, loaded
with destructive history, regenerating, growing in
the tightest seams.
From Middle Youth by Morgan Bach (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25.00)
To read more about Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, see https://tinyurl.com/5n998vxm
To learn more about Middle Youth, see https://tinyurl.com/ym9r7mse
