A poem: Indigo

dive down through the layers, swim back up

Indigo

trying to be more loving
I send my daughter a text
which reads back as useless
electronic sputter
so I add a yellow cat emoji
which is not
summer-stripped gold leaves
spun floating in the frightening
aqua whorls of the Clutha
and I do not say
how my chest boils 
the deep surges
of hidden canyon waterfalls
or how the banks
are thick with the strained silt
I’ve shed and shed and shed
I do not mention
that I wade, half drowned
through clots of spinning leaves
to the back flows of eddy lines
to say something
to say anything
like love

~ poem by Kirstie McKinnon, first published in The Otago Daily Times, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Indigo, watercolour on paper by Kirstie McKinnon.