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ATTICUS ATLAS
People often remark,
how sad, how awful,
when I tell the life-cycle
of the Atlas moth,
Atticus Atlas.
Once emerged from the chrysalis
it lives for five days.
It has no mouth,
cannot eat,
cannot smile or kiss.
It is silent.
In these five precious days
of adulthood’s wings,
there can only be flight
in the briefest of moments.
For the most part, the Atlas moth
lies still and silent,
waiting for a companion.
If successful,
eggs will be laid and carefully placed
before it lies down to sleep,
its beautiful wings
at the mercy of the soil dwellers.
We see too clearly
a never-ending cycle
of brief lives, stagnated
silent and ill-remembered
the only success an egg,
laid carefully on a leaf.
Atticus Atlas, you are well named.
You carry the weight of this earth
on your crystalline wings.
OAK TREE
For Keith
I can remember your smell
breathing it in, the
life it placed inside of me.
When you were indestructible.
When you were forever.
In spring you grew a daffodil dress
and I’d pick them as presents,
their laughing yellow dancing
on silent, sweating grass.
For summer you draped a
dramatic deep green stole
around your shoulders
where we sheltered from an
envious sun, swinging higher,
higher away from you.
In winter you let me gaze
through your ancient emptiness
to a clear, sharp sky,
purest on the iciest of days.
In those times I could just
glimpse your mortality.
But autumn, autumn was my favourite.
I would collect your offerings
saving them to smell and enjoy later,
collecting their joys when I crushed them
between my clumsy fingers.
we’d pile them all up high together and
Jump! from the swing
as it reached its peak.
O-WEEK VI
Each year
students return like bird migrants,
stilts and waders,
godwits, flying.
In the same week
Dunedin’s dandelions
agree that now is the time
to spread through the city
and regenerate.
Thousands and thousands
of brightly coloured students
laugh and sway through the a sunlit city.
Above them,
thousands and thousands
of dandelion seeds, tiny white arms outstretched and open
laugh and sway in the warm breeze.
he loves me, he loves me not,
he loves me, he loves me not…
Chased and caught,
wished upon, released,
the seeds follow a shimmering concrete river,
perhaps take root.
CENTRAL OTAGO
The shorn and shaven hills of Otago
fly past the window
and your eyes would swear
that rumbling, restless animals are
trapped under the mossy surface,
desperately writhing for escape
frozen in their struggle beneath
soft stone and unmoving ice,
painted with every green and crowned with white.
beyond the hobbit hillocks are the furious ancestral peaks,
thrust up from their own shattering pasts
still, with silent majesty,
and Ole’ Ma Galvin with her alpine breath
skimming them all and freshening the face
of that glacier-tear lake.
Sarah Paterson is a 3rd year PhD candidate researching contemporary Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is originally from Dunedin, New Zealand and is in Scotland on the William Georgetti Scholarship.