CILLA MCQUEEN OUR WEAVER OF WORDS

We are delighted that Cilla McQueen has won one of the country's top literary awards. In fact she is already a well recognised and much lauded poet. She is an intensely private woman who has spent the last 20 odd years in Bluff.

FOVEAUX EXPRESS
Diesel sounds aromatic
magenta, oxblood,
mineral smooth
any how as boronia

swivel that levers
a shoepolish lid,
key curls oily metal.
Poetry takes you apart,

puts you back different
as this day's passage
on shapeshifting water,
one to another island

swift as the stroke
of a pen the toothed strait
on the whale's path
chewed through, islets

scattered between,
text in motion
gimballed on muscling
swells, word-ware, cargo.

Bluff, April 2006
  

Awarua

One heron west from wary
shelter safe another sun turn
flower reed or home by other

sense to misty near beyond
his graveyard dreams I pass
between and harbours

double fill to shape were I
so shovelling petal hope to lock
our question in the former language. 

She is a national treasure .