Marylynn Sitting Under The Apple Tree
The wise woman sits in the shade
With stuffing peeping out from her chair,
Looking like a watercolour of the writer
In her wide-brimmed straw hat
Dark glasses
And flower-laden dress,
While a black kitten plays
In her tossed aside straw bag.
Watching her through an open window,
With bees playing in the lavender bush
And spiders weaving their homes,
This is where she belongs
At the bottom of the garden
In full bloom.
First published in takahē 40 (2000)
About Paula
Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. She was the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center writing residency in 2018.
Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Passages North, Barren, New Ohio Review, SWWIM, Gulf Coast, The Spinoff, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and Aotearotica. Her essays have been published in The Sun, Passages North, The Spinoff and Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (Victoria University Press).
She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric.