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niamh hollis-locke

Grandpa, I’m sorry, i’m contemplating entropy again


Sunday, and the pines are roaring behind the house,
            the hill an ocean, a wave standing still;
            dust and the hot hayscent of cut grass like England,
                                                                                   like driving
                        Cheddar Gorge with you in June, when you still had
                                                                        both feet, and 1,408 days ahead of you.
After you died
            there were no signs or portents,
                                                no visitations, words from your god;
                        the sun still rises, the rain still falls,
                                                the birds fly down the valley to the sea at dusk and
                                    I am still here and now there are six months of things
                                                            that you don’t know about,
            mortality a time-zone too far.

It is Sunday and I am on the hill
                        making a new religion for myself,
            the hymn of the body the bloodstream
                                                            the heartbeat,
                                    stretch of muscle over bone. I am weaving
                                                                                                a winding sheet from dry grass,
cheek flat to the back of the earth;
                                    Listen,
                                                there are fossils dreaming of being land
                                                                                                being ocean,
                                                there are hyphae and taproot whispering songs about water,
            and the mushrooms and the worms turning everything to dirt. Listen,

God is a tree
            is a forest;
God is a body of water,
and we are only borrowed carbon and when we die we become everything
or nothing at all but

             for now there are birds
in the evening,
and blue valleys at dusk;
            a warm body against mine at night,
                                                                        soft with dreaming.


Niamh Hollis-Locke was born in England, but now lives in Wellington in a small house full of books. Her work has been published in New Zealand and the UK, and in 2023 she was shortlisted for the Ginkgo Prize’s Best Poem of the UK Landscape award. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing specialising in ecofiction, is the current guest editor of Minarets (Compound Press), and, when she can find the time, is working on her first collection.