For me, ‘poetic’ is about how we see the world, the depth and breadth of what we notice, the emotions of what we attend to. When I walk across the Christchurch car park after rain, I can see cracks, and patches of dry concrete. But I also notice warm lines, none of them straight, that meet and diverge, and meet again; that create fractures and small gullies in which lie small rounded stones of a darker, more blue, grey. I discover that they came from the wide bed of a local river, brought in after the earthquake destruction, and that roundedness is the result of millenia spent turning in rivers of ice, pushed from the high mountains down towards the ocean.

A poetic way of seeing attends to all this, allows time for the noticing, attends and reflects. Makes connections with people rebuilding the city after the earthquake, dealing with the bad memories and after effects. A poetic perspective induces compassion and awareness of beauty and pain co-existing.