Oparure Road, Waitomo
Not quite stubble, more the plucked flesh of fowl,
after the maize harvest, cut to the grain, close cropped
paddocks. An April sun draws shadows across the land,
velvety black, thick as sump-oil, the air glass bright,
though filtered as if the light voltage had dimmed, but
nothing as definite as that, except for the sliding
partitions that are invisible, so that the plucked flesh
has become crew-cut paddock, and barely a minute gone.
The scene slipping by seemingly so ancient every second
caught up in an eternity of stillness, and the light that
lacquers the surface of everything, shiny as an iridescent
backed beetle on line-after-line of maize stubble, in
the slow and wondrous tilt of the earth, barely audible
yet felt—each valley holds its own set of mediaeval ruins,
as if one fortified town had fallen one after the other,
reduced to foundations of stacked limestone, half buried,
boulders strewn over hillsides, loosed from some trebuchet;
the violence long since retreated back to the underworld.