A theology built
from prayers I swallowed—
yet something moves
in the corner of the room,
as if the unsaid
learned to stand.
Kia hora te marino,
may calm widen—
not as ease,
but as a forgotten name
dragging itself
up the spine,
damp with the dark
that kept it.
The sea holds still—
unnaturally still—
a surface waiting
for the next breath
to choose its shape.
Kia whakapapa pounamu te moana,
may the moana shine like pounamu,
its weight tipping the shore
as memory presses
through greenstone light—
a pressure familiar
to bone,
not mind.
Sometimes te kārohirohi
rises in a sudden wave,
and a figure forms—
shimmered, wavering,
but purposeful—
stepping from heat
that shouldn’t hold shape.
It walks ahead of me
into morning’s raw hollow;
each footprint fills
before it fades—
a path
I’m already taking.
The tide returns
without sound,
edging close
as if listening.
Every unsaid prayer—
the ones I locked
behind the teeth—
begins to surface,
foaming at my ankles,
insistent,
intact.
Silence tightens—
a pulse beneath the skin,
breath held under tide,
waiting
for whatever
I become
when I finally
meet its shape.
Topher Shields is a poet from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work explores fracture, ritual, and the unsettling quiet between memory and breath. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, The Shore, DIALOGIST, The Bangalore Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and others. He writes along the fault line where silence transforms.