òran neo-làthaireachd
by Eartha Davis
Love is
waking here.
Love is rowing
a forever song
across your
palm.
The palm
rewrites herself.
A river
grows.
—
There is no one
to tell me
when the ocean was born.
How light
creases
water.
How bodies sleep
on an altar of
forgiveness.
—
Suppose
we are loving
underwater.
A way
of translating
the salt.
A way
of polishing
heart stones.
—
We give
rivered
testimony.
Ripen
in the
leaving.
Mar sin leibh, mouth says.
It opens
like a cathedral of wanting.
Mar sin leibh an-dràsta.
You
understand.
Fingers
crossing.
There is
no word for
absence.
Eartha wishes to live gently by a river. She placed second in the 2022 Woorilla Poetry Prize Youth Section, was nominated for Best of the Net in 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Creative Writing New Zealand’s Short Story Prize. Her work is published or forthcoming in Wildness, Rabbit, Frozen Sea, Minarets, Modron, Baby Teeth Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, JMWW, LEON Literary Review, Arboreal Magazine, ELJ Editions, the Basilisk Tree, the Stirling Review, Where the Meadows Reside, the Spellbinder Magazine, the engineidling, Discretionary Love, Sour Cherry Magazine, Revolute, & Eunoia Review, among others. She honours her Ngāpuhi ancestors and the Wiradjuri people, on whose land she lives, breathes, and writes.
