Poem 91

From where this comes in Folio # 1 it looks to be the last poem I wrote in Hamilton before leaving for post-university life in Wellington … so written in the long and lambent summer of ’80/’81 …

Origami

That ball of screwed up newspaper
you hold compressed in your hands
is the world
              ridges 
folds and creases like a flag 
tightly furled
and winding lines of print
that scramble broken and blurred
where the tired paper frays
scuffed and smudged words
making only
garbled news of yesterday
marked again in the trudge
of this hour's feet
which both bury and exhume

yet 
   only unclench your hands
and the buckled world
blooms