Predestination

Predestination was something my mother
thought was a holiday you found out
about when you got to the airport.

I saw it as removing the blindfold
after they put you in the coffin,
discovering too late they’d dressed

you in a shirt that didn’t match 
your jacket. That’s you for eternity.
Taking you out of your natural habitat,

deciding for you where you’d grow up
was just a package holiday in an ill-
fitting suit, with no access to a changing room.

I remember when we lived in that cold
ground-floor flat in Norwich, on the wilds
of East Anglia, home of Boudica.

You went to your mother’s in Zagreb, 
she was starting to be poorly. I booked
us a predestination from Thomas Cook

in the high street. Cyprus. All inclusive.
Your eyes read torment when you folded
open the envelope. It was all too much.

Your mother’s failing health, the trips
to Vrbanićeva to look after her. The memories
of the apartment from your childhood.

And now someone deciding your destination.
But we left the snow drifting in from the North
Sea, to the land of myths, where the sun rose

above Petra tou Romiou, where Aphrodite’s Rock
sits stunned in the frozen-like sea. We followed 
the road to Paphos St Paul took, where he met

Elymas, the false prophet, and I think again
of how my mother thought of predestination
as a lucky dip. How St Paul would have liked her.

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Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki Makaurau–based writer whose work has appeared in collections internationally. He was shortlisted for the 2023 inaugural At the Bay | I Te Kokoru hybrid manuscript awards, and was runner-up in the 2022 International Writers’ Workshop Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems.