Katy's Christmas, from NZ to England (After Bill Manhire's "Kevin")
- Loveday Why
I know where the dead go, Katy.
They are not in tunnels or caves at nearly midnight, where constellations of glow worms spark up strings of lights
winding among ferns, the gradual shapes of punga, vine's overhead long line
as if, in darkness, we are underwater and these are signs.
Not in far-off music that bends round the corners of houses on the air of a summer afternoon,
the forever waves slipping in and out of perception, looping back in moment's pause
when, for a second, meaning is yoked to what you have always believed in.
Not when you glance up at that sudden thought or sound
and in the rearrangement of the pause it is lost, half-found.
But in the teacup lifted to a million lips a second,
warm ceramic smoothing the palm, oceanic, momentous,
the whirr of a dragonfly that electrifies air above the wetlands,
the stir in a Winter picnic rug where your knees were curled up.
This is not poetry, my friend, this is science.
Every word you make outlasts you.
And I know where the dead people go.
Into the snow, of course! The snow.
• Loveday Why is a UK poet and past recipient of the Derek Walcott Prize for poetry. Recently settled in Dunedin, she is starting up an ecobusiness focusing on native reforestation.
