Tuesday Poem: Aroundabout by Helen Lehndorf

Me and you with our babies:

We walk around the streets

steal fruit and visit your childhood,

hide the spoils in the prams.

Lemons from the school-yard and

crab-apples from your old house.

They aren't even sour.

We drive up to the windmills,

they chop through the air,

make a sound like a

heartbeat in utero. There, are

the Manawatu plains, as flat

as you say you feel afterwards.

I give you a pretty black dress

to wear to parties and a bunch

of coriander wrapped in a

supermarket bag. One last

cup of tea. You drink it standing up.

We wave you south. No looking back.

Helen Lehndorf is a writer and writing teacher living in Palmerston North. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Kaupapa (eds Hinemoana Baker and Maria McMillan) and Swings and Roundabouts (ed Emma Neale), where this poem first appeared. She has had work produced on Radio New Zealand National and feature writing published in the Dominion Post. Helen and I have been making art journals together for a couple of years, you can see some scans of the project here.

There is something about that moment in the second stanza, when the blades of the turbines chop through the air. I can hear the whomp-whomp of it, and the connection with a heart beat in utero is genius. I like the way in the poem grows up; child-like and mischievous stealing fruit - to a black party dress and no looking back. In the middle those ominous cutting blades, it's dark but not without hope. Lovely.

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