This Poem Needs No Apology
Those extinction events are coming for you.
The facts of life somersault for birds and bees.
They got linguistic cleansing in a town by town take-down.
Will I ask the weeping willow to weep for me?
I have red coals for eyes, skin scribbled with strange signs,
and dinner waits to be served cold as revenge,
so either junk it all or clasp it to your chest.
We can list the listing hopelessness,
the gathered sacred texts, the bull of the orthodox,
door-knobs that don't open in time,
volcanic cones that wait to erupt.
Napoleon's grandeur was the brandy of the damned.
Ghost-written success stories wave from flag-poles.
Batons are readied, thin as a pizza-crust.
A cinnamon dust lifts on the wind.
The grinding of lenses is carrying on.
Typhoons of tycoonerie whirl along.
The radio glugs the voice of Joan Baez, pure as spring water.
Poisonous words coil through the body politic.
We, the downtrodden, you have smoked to the stub.
Now you guzzle the Dead Sea and burp.
Those scrolls beneath your eyes close up.
You are drenched with defoliant, while we bleed as a people.
However long you live, we will always be your dead.
David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He is a former Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and his latest collection Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in March 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024.
