Waiting

In an aquarium on the 65th floor, a dolphin is staring at me. Underneath us, eight hundred people cross the road. This is a premonition, water overhead: like in Atlantis when someone looked out their marble window one morning and said oh, the tide’s high today. A part of them was expecting what came next. The Air New Zealand magazine has a story about travelling to Iceland to watch glaciers calve. When the ice crashes into the water, it says, everyone cheers. It’s what we’ve been waiting for.

Zoë Higgins

Zoë Higgins is a Pākeha poet of British and Swiss descent. She grew up on Horomaka Banks Peninsula and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her work has been published in Sport, Starling, Mayhem, and Aotearotica. 'Waiting' was written as part of the Starling residency at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival.