Mount Albert

Mount Albert, called Owairaka
also: volcano in slumber,
scoria thighs and skirts of grass
feed half a dozen grazing cows
cookies-and-cream coloured
flanks, fat bellies wobbling

at crater's edge
alongside an archery range,
an old football field
amidst eucalypt trees
windbent and scattered
bark-tongues peeling patchwork,

and beneath the cattlehooves,
beneath mud, beneath leaf-litter
and fine-grade footpath gravel
are older stones, buried deep:
some cold, some warming