RARELY SOFT OR CONSOLATORY:
If we are born again
as ‘ice rain’
then no doubt you are the ice
and I am the rain inside –
protected by matter the same as my own
only frozen,
hardened.
If golf ball sized hail is falling in Southland,
then you are a field of bucking sheep
and I am a young boy in the cab of a ute
looking on,
wanting to use my small form to block out
the onslaught from the sky.
And my father,
that boy’s father,
one hand on the wheel
is our circumstance –
jaw all set
and hard like wet canvas
caught in a gale,
side-eying me with contempt, as all my muscles tense
on instinct, with that wish,
to run from him to the sheep – that is to run from him to you.
He is half mocking, half actual hating
of my wretched roadkill-rabbit softness
which he thought had bred out
of his son – out of me.
When I look to you – as ice rain,
as an entire field of sheep bludgeoned by hail,
as the so called ‘choiceless hope in grief’,
I no longer see something holy –
I don’t try to define you
as wholly good or wholly bad anymore.
When I look to you, under your permafrost,
I seem to see the terror that I feel
in the face of all that I know to be beautiful
and, in my teenage
naivety,
I feel I have seen the world
just because I have known you.
Charles Ross
Year 13
Logan Park High School, Dunedin
