Snorkelling, I
Sink. Melt in sea-salt and sway.
Bated breath, I’m a shadow
stippled on the water’s
sunned underskin.
A body suspended —
wrists twined by threads
of unspooled sunlight
and hanging in the ebb.
In the reef I hear my belly
as I breathe: the pull of a diaphragm
rushes above the clicks, the critters,
every sound these human ears
tend to forget how to hear.
I’m undone in ripples of kelp
and manes of beaded seaweed
down where life first learned to grow.
A parrotfish rambles by the coral,
pecks here and there.
Even the sunlight slows enough
so my waterlogged eye
unpractised in this liquid light
can focus each ray, each golden
glowing spear. Even they
disintegrate
before they reach the sand.
A triggerfish moves slowly by.
Spies me watching it.
Humans like to think of ourselves
as the world’s observers,
discerners.
I don’t think we are.
I am clumsy down here.
The triggerfish slows.
Suspended in swell
the fish and I
hold each other.
Our eyes each strange to the other.
We become unstrangers.
Kelp coils. The surface above us
roils and rolls. Down here
for now
time doesn’t tick
but sways.
Still, my body.
Still I shadow, still I sway.
The parrotfish
shits a bit more seafloor.
The ocean presses into me
or I press into the ocean.
This world is a gentle drift. Kelp
lift their spines to the current.
Sun sifts in past planktons, salts.
This is our world: where
crabs shift sand, kick up art,
swap secrets in a language I don’t speak,
sequester them in broken shell. We are
nothing without this percolating
deep, this world,
our world the world
we must keep.
On Darkness
again, these myths. again
we mire our minds in a mythology
of the dark: home of demons,
host of ghosts. darkness,
dearth and ignorance. threat
looming in the trees.
the ancient greek described the dead
as σκιά, the shades. as lightless lurkers
who’d lost mind, memory, thought
to the thin slips of the styx.
in a conquered world, dark became devil,
destruction, dread. became the lonely and the
lost. became unlearned, unclean, unchristian.
became underclass and melanin.
so light became white became right became pure
and the enlightenment wrote itself
on racial science and bought bodies.
we’ll disobey
with hands in the mud,
our feet in the clay.
now we await the endarkenment.
we paint and sing and write for stars
but stars breathe only in the dark
and stellar nurseries are found
in the clump and collapse
of dusty dense and lightless space.
dark matter is so named
because physicists have not observed it interact
with any sort of ray. dark matter in fact,
may make up eighty-five per cent
of stitches in the universe.
and every caul is a luminous dark:
within the egg, an uncracked shell
within the dirt, a loamy writhe
of beetle, worm and all the tiny
decomposers, rotters, rooters,
sporing, scoring music-makers.
a whale who dies will sway and
sink to the abyssal zones of sea
too deep for even sun to swim.
the whale becomes a new world,
gnawed by sleeper shark and eel,
octopus and crab. skin stripped and
sinew chewed like any ill we vigil to
undo. there was always enough for all.
the critters eat blubber and nutrients
rain to newly fruiting seafloor where
wrists of kelp itch out from the sand.
then watch – the osedax eat at the
great arched ribs and jail cells
disintegrate. all sorts find
home in the dark and
the bones.
and in other calendars,
day begins when darkness comes.
in other languages,
tongues are fungal cilia
whose phonemes taste like pheromones
and voltage pulsing through the dirt.
to other eyes,
darkness to a human anatomy
isn’t dark at all.
society works hard to stop our eyes from learning
the dark. a winter’s midnight
huddled in a clearing of bush: no bulb no fluoro
no led. the longer we stood, the longer
we looked, the lighter the night became.
and in an old stone well built on a spring,
where sunrays stumble on the rim
where dew gathers on fingers of moss
that every now and then
release a drip — it plinks
in the deep dim. these damp walls
are places of frogspawn and
snail. echo and croak. to
the wells, our thirsting throats
call and crawl for freshwater.
each evening, the birds
perch and open their throats
to drink up daylight, make pitch from each
sip of the sky. first they swallow the violet,
the blue, the yellow, the peach
and soon the treeline’s crimson bleed.
bellies full of daylight, the birds
can sleep as moths emerge
to scribble secret notes in the dark. we call
them constellations. and again
every dawn
the birds disgorge
the drunken daylight as song.
sleep begs us to crawl beneath closed eyelids,
as dark is the only pigment of dream.
our bodies will always carry our dead.
i hope to be the soft trail
slick, sticky, silver mucus
traced by snails on munching mulch.
to sink in the dirt
and in dirt is the dark
and in the dark is the rot
and in the rot is the endless work
of recomposing.
Only the Mountain
This poem was written at Takapo in Te Waipounamu, Aotearoa. I thank the Maori for their custodianship of these lands.
Blushed sky: fuchsia cheek.
The moon eyes me
kneeling on the pebbly bank
under moss-shine, ginger-glow,
snow-tossed mountain tops
great muscles of earth
all veiny green and white and grey
scribbled crags where lilac shadows
seep in the pink
as dye soaks sodden paper
now
thirteen
swallows
drag a
chevron
of
shadows
out to
spear
the final
cloud
and the cloud
sluices off the sky.
two gulls at my feet.
a lake at the foot of the mountain.
the lake is a rippling cornea
in which the mountain peaks
grow downwards from the atmosphere
great stalactites clinging to the sky-
rim below the last ginger smudge
of sun.
and somewhere
in the forest peppered on the mountains
a bee shuffles through the day’s
final pollen. a snail
slimes up a rock. a kea climbs
the perfect crag for that
sublime view of draining day
but I can’t see any of it
all hidden by distance and
my retinal limits —
the light recedes.
shadows gulp down
details. the world re-
seeds. now it’s just
the mountain and the
pebbles and me
until I become pebble and
the pebbles are too small
to be seen and
then only the mountain
remains.
Bring a Hundred Moons
An acreage of semilunar holes
are dug in desertified land:
new pores in dry skin. Bore water
will well in each one like
tideswell tugged to rockpools.
Green will shoulder up from
dust, little heathered husks.
So too children on the shore
who burrow in the sand to
reach the watery upwell, ankle-
deep in the moon’s cool pull.
In the innovation industry
the latest pledge of progress
is to eat atmospheric heat
with platoons of synthetic leaves
mine mountains to store it
and still, the forests can be logged
as if a tree is just a tree
and not a universe more.
Then any other startup tech
that’s worth the venture capital
to pay off private jets.
Palpate the belly of a seabird
and plastic crackles inside.
But earth was never barren
and this penchant for god-being
will be our undoing, I think.
Bring a hundred moons
to the sand and they’ll
pull water from the loam.
Pry life from the dry
until it’s all budding.
What seemed empty
fills itself.
Our bodies are needy beings
and injure easily. Still, sinew
and skin have instincts to heal
that even our minds forget
at times. Immune fluids
clean a cut. Desertified earth
will green its wounds
like a reflex. Plants wax
their leaves in heat. Weeds
root in any cracked concrete.
Distant blue mountains
trace the craggy keloid scars
where old earth once
healed to atmosphere.
Polyp
From Oxford Languages:
nature (n.) 1. The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.
Nature, noun,
and humanity in exile
as defined by
western experts.
Nature, noun: the category
cuts an us-world border,
kin from kin, dismemberment
akin to knifing skin.
Nature, noun,
as if a skin to step from
crumpled at the feet
and thinking raw muscle
won’t bleed. So we
cauterise with concrete.
So the human, externalised,
becomes exceptionalised.
So the human, severed,
becomes untethered.
Untethered and more ready
to accept harm.
Now taxonomies
try to classify species
like caging water.
The greenish warbler defies
this cartography of border.
Species refers to individuals able to birth
fertile offspring. The warblers of east Siberia
can parent with warblers of China
who parent with warblers of Tibet
who parent with warblers
of west Siberia who cannot parent
with warblers of the east. So where
to separate the species?
So the border seems a fiction.
Humans, never separate
from cockroach or from cockatoo,
nor the flame robin whose syrinx
makes strings of honey from air,
nor the plump-lipped leaves
whose breath we breathe.
Our lungs sponge the world in:
all pollen and petrichor,
virus and dawn.
An atmosphere in orbit
pivots every part of itself to sun.
The sun isn’t fussed, upholds
no border. The body
is a deciduous part
of an ever-budding swell
of cellular life.
Life evolved just once
from which we all
now effloresce:
each of us a polyp
budding from a larger
coral, all bodies
being water borrowed
from the ocean’s belly
from the cloud’s grey guts
brief as dewdrops
and soft as dawns
that glint inside them
silver
like an eye.
Poetry by Edie Popper
Edie (they/them) is a poet and critical care nurse living and working on unceded Gagidal, Wangal and Burramattagal Lands. Their poetry has been published in Meniscus, Australian Poetry Journal, The Marrow, and Babyteeth Arts. Edie’s work often explores how we may reconnect with the earth as our kin in order to combat the climate crisis. Edie lives on stolen lands and is of settler descent. Climate repair must be led by First Nations Knowledges.
