Green Shores

a poem.

Open Heart Surgery is a newsletter devoted to exploring metamorphosis, unravelling, questioning and healing. I write essays and poems in service to personal and collective liberation - the personal, political, social, cultural and spiritual realms are all present here. This is a space for divergent thinking and for open hearts.

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- 35mm film photo of one of my favourite gardens in Aotearoa - Dharma Gaia.

Green Shores

There are green shores in my nettle tea.

Summer winds sing
and whisper their secrets.
You—
you are a caterpillar,
breaking out of her cocoon.

You do not know yet
what you do not know,
but you can smell
the change of seasons—
petrichor.

Pastures are green,
verdant, promising—
and the morning dew glistens.
You have strayed a thousand times,
yet here you are again.

You have lived
through years of grey,
and blue,
and black.
But now—

there is green, again.

Harakeke,
Rimu,
Kauri,
Tōtara,
Kawakawa—

green.

Like the native moss
your great-grandfather studied.
Green.
Like your eyes,
now wide again in wonder.

Green—
emergent,
like the fertile new horizon
you can finally
see.

There are green shores
in my nettle tea.

- 35mm film photo of Kawakawa, a native medicinal plant of Aotearoa.