Quarterly Literary Review Singapore
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Vol. 3 No. 1 Oct 2003

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Rimutakas
For Stephen Oliver

Journeying through the Rimutakas,
a day after New Year's, I'm a passenger

watching closely: the hills.
In my head, a line comes back to me from

you: 'A soap-grey slate could landslip you off
a hair-pin
...' Just that. It was here a few years

back I nearly did do that; too young to
know better, taking those left-lane turns

fast. Now, today, the hills are under
mist and this is not the Mangawekas,

but there's a sense of the universal to it all,
the animism of mountains: the landscape

of death
. Baxter and Campbell knew it,
just like the trampers, the mountaineers...

I look on down to the valley floor,
and half-imagine a poet might well be doing a Kees

hiding out, pitching his tent below the stars,
losing all self, out here amongst the hills.

By Mark Pirie


QLRS Vol. 3 No. 1 Oct 2003

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About Mark Pirie
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  Other Poems in this Issue

On Silence
By Mark Pirie.

Mouth Piece
By W.B. Keckler.

Here Russia spreads her legs like the body compass of a prima ballerina
By Ronny Someck.

Return to Kuantan
By Oswald LeWinter.

modes of transport
By Shazanah Hassan.

Planting Mines
By Thow Xin Wei.

The All-Night Attendant at the Foreign Experts' Compound
By Charles Lowe.

 

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