shot glass
title
nz shot glass
Issue # 2 September 2010
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Elizabeth Welsh is a New Zealand short story writer, poet & editor who has been published in a number of New Zealand literary magazines including Blackmail Press, Side stream, Enamel and the upcoming New Zealand feature of The International Literary Quarterly. She is the Arts & Letters review writer for Morph magazine. She has been published academically in the Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies and spoken at the recent Katherine Mansfield symposium held in Melbourne, Australia. Elizabeth is the Editor of The Typewriter an online poetry initiative for emerging New Zealand poets currently in its third year.

http://ewelsh.wordpress.com
http://thetypewriter.wordpress.com


Elizabeth Welsh


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Hokitika & Heraclitus

I stood in the flecked crystalline cataract
between Fox Glacier and Hokitika
poised, watching two Buddhist monks
pile out of a campervan and straddle
the wooden piling fence to the lip of the river.

You made a video of it on your new camera,
unknowingly, and so we re-played the vision afterwards
sitting in the motor-camp kitchen.
The monks should have been purposeful and studied,
but instead they glissaded down
the seasonally flooded slope,
their eyes fixated on the waterfall.

I wanted to hold this image down, of perpetually moving peace, to knock nails
in these journeying figures, to damn up the gushing water,
to hold it solid in my palm.

Instead we watched it on a screen in Hokitika, swiftly flipping past our faces.