Poems by Lee Jane Taylor

An ancient has so much time for drowning.
She should burn, could be angry will be she thinks so many bloodied spites lists
once might have marked ridges in her mind amongst the free wheeling will again
lists pointless wasteful now, list and tip drip as water, enmity lays adrift in gaps
of atmosphere mass-less mast-less impervious to sense, revenge so many
spites but her fettered dusky points of mind spotting as it turns all sink and set
on this one unfairness of consciousness and night when she slips safe, submerged
in her twin kindnesses of silver silence and golden dark but finds her dream self
a true self, herself in perspective shrunk surrounded by hammered dimensional
tempera panels estimating life shining with deepest bias still working at finding
herself to somewhere, to some shore always slow weighted always tide tired might
ask Hineteiwaiwa, who maybe shifts a wisp points direction with a cloudy shadow
finger but Leto’s eyes swim black on the upside down of our phasing moon
dragging not only luggage but full wardrobes every needful thing stuffed
wired coils of time at her wrists, children of unsettled ages broken toboggans
worlds of asphalt       lifetimes of one       foot after another       waking to a want
of rage       against slog,       through sleep       but heat       only cools
at first breaths       to ash,       lifts away leaves
only handfuls of stones and the long
long slow       of falling beneath
the cold weights of seas
through the weightlessness

of cold

such are the ancient dreams
of Leto.

*Leto is a Greek goddess of motherhood idealised for her extreme suffering, cursed with landlessness during birth of the gods Apollo and Artemis

**Hineteiwaiwa in tikanga is the spiritual guardian of childbirth, weaving and cycles of the moon.