Iain Britton


Poem for a Black Window

Through the eye of a window —
it could be a black hole, I tumble outwards
like a sheet of newspaper, or a gymnast

                             cartwheeling, like
                             a starched-white
                             star.

Caught in the wind, I
somersault over houses,
plant

                             a flag on a black beach
                             where the sand dunes
                             nudge bones into the grass,

bones that once
propped up sheep, that helped
whiten our hills. My flag

                             wears a hat. The sun
                             bends a shadow. The wind
                             plays with lizards

skittering on sand. A city, multi-
lensed, like a camera-mad sightseer
leans over the sea

                             dripping contaminants.
                             I paint the windows
                             black.

In this house, rooms
survive on little light. When doors
open, a fine line of gold

                             separates the nights, the days,
                             the seasons. It separates families
                             from those who breathe, from those

who can’t,
from those who only cough in the waves.
I work the landscape into a sheet of

                             corrugated iron and paint it black.
                             I let the yellowness of the moon
                             run thinly.

A neon Aurora Australis
electrifies the clouds – colouring
Coca Cola on my clothes. Time to

                             track back up the
                             black beach. Somersault
                             in reverse.

I roll up the flag. There are gaps on the horizon,
wide enough for ships to fit through, for
albatrosses which look like people.

                             On a cliff-top, there’s this house
                             with a broken window and a solitary light
                             moving shapes from room to room.



Iain Britton was born and educated in Palmerston North, New Zealand, spent many years living in the UK and is now Maori Studies Director at a large independent boys’ school in Auckland. His poems are published widely in NZ, Australia and the UK. Cinnamon Press in the UK will be publishing his first collection of poems in February 2008.


 
 
 
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