Jane Griffin is an Auckland poet and Learning Area Director of The Arts at The Raye Freedman Arts Centre in Epsom.
Her poetry is published in Poetry New Zealand, Takahe, Blackmail Press and in Sidestream.
Invocation at Sinalei
Sun not up yet
at daybreak
Neither nga moemoea nor nga manu
broken glass nor kristelnacht
though inside paradise constructed
we visit all the places of our own conception
Here where even our skin is for sale,
aliens in birdland,
here where beauty forces itself
inside our open sockets
we cringe beside dinosaur flora
our Lilliputian bodies
paint a hot pink trail of hibiscus
sapped of their diving strength
Out there where the reef roars
and underneath
in blue-lipped coral gardens
hot and cold rips pressed us legless yesterday
back into the tides of our own becoming
abandoned us to flipperless struggle
like German swimmers
clutching at disintegrating handsful
of an empire on the ebbing tide
Look up
maybe later we will make headway
after the slow-pressed days of tangled limbs and
humid dreaming in Fale 16.
