ROBIN PEACE

Star gazing

The stars are clatter sharp in these small hours,
brass-bright with aching cold,
opening the garden to frost in early October.
I need smoke pots under the blossoms
to defer the griping chill sinking down
from the hills, but have none.
Gardening always to the resignation of the season:
there will be fruit or not.

Out there in the ice scatter of planets and asteroids,
rocks melt and burn.
The unruly brightness of the past
drills pinpricks in a history I'm late for.
Conscious carbon, making and remaking
the inward gates of water, fire and ice.

Then there's Earth. So made, but I'm landed on it.
Its mountains rise to a scale
I can almost work with:
the deforming roils and stuttering shatters
of magma and earthquakes,
the upward buckle and thrust
producing cooled granites for the relays of erosion,
the source of seasons in the tilting chance of stars.

The crystal cold has numbed my fingertips.
My neck has cricked and craned to catch a meteor.
I feel a lusty mineral-fall from other worlds come ground
and dusted down into the makings of my garden,
and, in the dark, the astral circumstance
of deep composted fires tickles a seed to life.

Robin Peace (PhD, CRSNZ) was born in Otūmoetai in 1951, on the hills overlooking Waikareao. She has lived and worked for various lengths of time in Tamaki Makarau, Otepoti, Karanema, Kirikiriroa, and Te Whanganui-a-Tara as a teacher/lecturer/researcher in schools, universities (Waikato and Massey), and the public service. She has travelled extensively overseas but now lives in Ōtaki, grows food, and regenerates the margins of the Otepua-Paruāuku wetland. The recent development of her creative writing practise is informed by her professional life as a geographer/social scientist but also by being a reader, traveller, naturalist, and swamp-loving immigrant in Aotearoa. 

Since 2018, when she retired from full-time work, Robin has published two collections: Detritus of Empire (Cuba Press, 2024) and A Passage of Yellow Red Birds (Mākaro Press, 2018). Individual poems and prose have been published in The Spinoff (2024, 2023), The Power in Our Truth: the Truth of Our Power (Te Wānanga o Raukawa, 2023), More Favourable Waters (Cuba Press, 2021), Evaluation Matters—He Take Tō Te Aromatawai (New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 2020), Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 (Massey University Press, 2020), and Pukeahu Anthology (Massey University online, 2015). She enjoys reading her work at public events with other poets and writers and has participated in a community radio project to profile poets and poetry on the Kapiti coast (Kapiti Poets, episodes 4 and 5). 

Peace comments: 'Detritus of Empire is a collection that began as a personal challenge to write 100 poems in 100 days about the introduced grasses in my lawn but broadened into wider themes assembled around ideas of colonisation. The concept of "detritus" references the disintegration and erosion of what existed "before", but also the miscellaneous "remnants" or results (children, orchards, pasturelands, quarries) of colonial endeavour. "Star Gazing", the last poem in the collection, is the meditation of an immigrant gardener in the southern hemisphere. Asteroids and stardust have played a longer game on earth than humans have and, on a personal level, this poem speaks to one of the ways I understand my place in all of this.'

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