Paula Harris

Rangi Lying Down With Papatuanuku

We lie together
And your body touches
The rise of my hills
And your body touches
The darkness of my cave

We lie together
And my body touches
The lightness of your clouds
And my body touches
The whisper of your air

We lie together
And your fingers clasp
The warmth of my earth
And my fingers clasp
The nothing of your sky

We lie together
And your body
Enters mine
And my body
Receives yours

First published in Spin 26 (1996)
Also published in Sweet Clarity (1996)

Paula Harris

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.