ora

Soft
reliquaries
of
speech. A paper
heart
meeting
fire (meeting
you). Doves
dunking
love
in
loss. Mothers
bowing
before
a
budding
moon. Pulse
promising
prayer, then
the closing
of
wound’s
fence. Apricot
admittance. A lover
sailing
towards
absence. Forgotten
summers. Still-breathing
light
dripping
from
a griever’s
jaw. You.
Earth. An ocean
afraid
of
her
salt. A river
that rhymes
with
saving. Us-
two, us
together, cupping
each other’s
loneliness
in
the
dark…

Eartha Davis is a woman of Ngāpuhi & Scottish heritage living on Wurundjeri land. She is a 2025 Varuna Residency Fellow. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Anthology, Wildness, Cordite, Rabbit, South Coast Writer’s Centre Anthology, takahē, Frozen Sea, Minarets, Baby Teeth Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Circular Publishing, Revolute, JMWW, LEON Literary Review, and ELJ Editions, among others. She is currently working with Red Room Poetry on their POEM FOREST project. Her loves are mountains, rivers, birds.