Studying Classics by Correspondence

 In high school I learned to mispronounce

the names of Greek playwrights

and to identify columns:

Ionic, Corinthian and Doric.

A CD taught me about Herakles,

the painted slips

on vases slipped out

of their lesson booklets

and ran off–

Central Otago hills a

new backdrop

for their bacchanals.

The vase figures found

the dam was a walled city,

patrolled the top

with spears and chariots.

I opened vineyard gates

for them. We smashed

grapes with our feet–

purple to match flowering thyme.

We carved karyatids

out of tors, layers

of compressed stone

perpendicular to skirt folds.

They taught me how

to be a fragment–

impose slivers of myself

wherever I went.

The vase figures and I

danced between bones.

We revelled in

removed landscapes,

found abandoned

amphitheatres in

goldfields, made old

stones a chorus.

The base of the dam gaped–            

overflow gates

like the face

of a fallen god.

Faith Festival

i could draw a map of christian camps i’ve attended

across otago and southland

                                                   my youth group travelled in convoy

we whispered in bunkbeds       canvas       tents       woolsheds

muddy or dusty

played touch rugby                                        said grace together

                                                                 i love organised fun

but i knew i’d never come back

to lead bible study

one speaker projected her wedding pictures

on a big screen

told us girls we were butterflies

she saved herself

and we cheered!                   in the marquee

on the concrete slide                 we cheered!

wrestling in the mud pit               for lambs’ tails

we cheered! for her virginity

                                                                        so soft and woolly

Ella Borrie is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara based poet from Otago. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the IIML and was awarded the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry. Her work appears in Mimicry, Starling, Stasis Journal, Swamp, Landfall and Turbine | Kapohau.