Beside Her Window

Isobel may sit and think
beside her window.
she may look at the sky and see words,
see the blackbirds trilling metaphor
and the seagulls
flying through tunnels of verse.

she may see cars and boys and postcards
and just a little more than teenage love poetry -
an image, a pause, an unpicking
of her even seams and hemmed memories,
echoing a stitch of experience,
of salt-stained memoirs, edged with discomfort -

And she writes beauty anyway.

she has reasons, why she doesn't come
to school but can twist paper into artworks.
her nails not bitten but her hair hung melancholy
around her face, tangled in an elusive explanation
a series of similes through which she elaborates her absence.

and I, green eyed, would stitch her together as a tapestry.
cut short her frail endings and
leave her without tardiness or talent,
without empty, mocking street corners and then embraces
that cross my cross-stitch.

just a midnight I don't need to covet,
a sequin, an unravelling thread
and a memory
of a little more than a teenage love poem.


Kirsti Whalen
Epsom Girls' Grammar
Auckland

NZPS Home