Iain Britton

Fragments (Whakapapa)

Exactly where to sit
on this rocky ledge,
click heels,

salute birds, bats,
cicadas,
God’s sediment.

The world
is cast upside down
like the shrunken belly of a hill.

I swat a blowfly
sucking the print off
a cloud,

swivel slightly to listen to a horse
blowing loose earth from its nose,
rolling its body

in the smell of a wet field.
From this height,
the sun,

like a giant peach,
looks over my head -
just what is it I’m reading,

whose dust, whose ash,
exactly what to recall.
I breathe deeply,

slowly
from this bottled cold air.
I sign on the dotted line

to prove the authenticity
of this fragment,
that fragment.

The sky shuts down on the day,
on the night,
with me wedged between.