Given Poems for National Poetry Day 2018 – Adults

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Here are the entries for Best Poem for the Given Words competition for National Poetry Day. They all had to contain the five words decrepit, snow, nest, window and cast, taken from a poem The Hospice by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado.

You can read the winning poem Processional by Craig McGeady along with the judge's comments here and the poems from the Under-16s category here.

❆ ❆ ❆

Week’s end

The teacher casts her eyes across
the thick tide of papers, due Monday;

eyes like the puce bellies of fleas
darting on the still surface vacancy

of her memory. She cannot recall
name, face or speech of much before

this morning, but she cannot spend time
to nap the week off. Marking unsettles

like the back leg of a snow fox hunting;
nose pressed to coffee, she settles in.

Hands arrange mug, stack, soundtrack, biro:
the scrap lining of a nest to mark the layers,

layer the marks. Globes of light and ink
bunt at the midnight window. Look,

here’s young leviathan, pay attention, see
swift wisdom, and look – here’s a new foal –

earnest, fretful, struggling for an opinion.
It is some kind of love that drives the effort

in each of their leagues: the steadily prepared,
the all-night wonders – oh, detailed suitable!

oh, practised nonchalant! oh vague unfathomable!
oh, timid formulaic! oh wordy impenetrable!

Oh, decrepit red pen! Oh, bloody Monday.

Nicola Easthope
Raumati South

❆ ❆ ❆

The Magnolia Tree

I pass her. Dressed, sitting beside the hospital bed, shoulders hunched, eyes cast down. ‘I never want to be decrepit,’ she’d said. Next door I meet doctors, social workers. Explain that today I am my mother’s voice.

They move her to a place where rooms look onto green lawns, fuchsias grow in shaded beds. We visit in the evenings. My daughter climbs onto the bed, nests beside her, speaks softly. Do you remember, Grandmother, your raspberries, how we used to rush outside, looking for the bright redness among leaves and prickles. Sunday lunches, swimming in the pool, singing lessons - do you remember teaching me The Sandman, Grandmother? We kiss her closed eyes. Tell her it's time.

This morning the magnolia outside my window is all flowers. Pink petals falling. Softness of snow. I remember it all again, and how my daughter sang To Music.

Marjory Woodfield
Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

The first snow

While looking up the word decrepit
in an ancient dictionary of my youth,
digesting its exact meaning
I feel it in my bones.

The book back on its shelf,
me on my way to the kitchen,
I cast a quick glance through the window
and stop mid step.

The first flakes
of the first snow
are floating in the air
like miniature kites.

Eventually they knit a fluffy beret
For the empty birds nest
on the naked branch of the sycamore tree.

Carin Svensson
Thames/Sweden

❆ ❆ ❆

The Hedgehog

She traced its timid tracks
and there,

curled and bristled,
its heat softly bled
a nest in the snow.

Too early, winter cast its cloak,
emboldened by a decrepit sun.

She watched,
forehead pressed upon the window,
and let her breath bead across the glass.

Ella Robinson
Dunedin

❆ ❆ ❆

Single-use downfall

Brittle nest, a jittery, nervy shape
Unbound and taken up as a soulless billow
With poetic arcs, all loose-skinned, untethered
Single-use plastic, cast off and abhorred
Now drifting, fake snow, a fragile deserter, then
Window-bound, fence-caught or web-stuck
Decrepit, abandoned, pitiful, empty
Scattered, a remnant, a lost escapee
Blown-out, piece of cold-slip, a contaminant
Directionless, dirty, a mislead pioneer
Now tussock-torn, tumbleweed, sand-skate
Till salty as foam flotsam, a jellyfish cheat
Cheap bait, imposter, fraudulent food
All swollen, silent, tangled and twisted
A dark trap, strangling snag, tight net descent
Making tangled-up breath a lingering expiration.

Arwen Flowers
Helensville, Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Crossing the Rio Grande

at the canyon mouth deep within the divide
decrepit limestone cliffs cast cool shadows

a black-tailed rattlesnake nests in the shade
shakes its death rattle in el despoblado

maps show a solid blue line, an unwilling border
always changing, always carving, always going

somewhere around a deep bend, cottonwoods
spray swirls of seed flurries, the snow of early spring

these long-time illegal immigrants rooted
along the current – silent sentinels to desperation

across the big river, past juniper snags, beyond
the flowering yucca and out into the harsh desert

a window between two nations – the moon sets
at sunrise and the impending thunderstorms bloom

Jenna Heller
Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

The Stars Aligned

There’s no moon out tonight cielo
just me, back pressed into the swell of a hillock
gazing at a nest of stars
held by the branches
of a barren tree
my thoughts wandering.

Will I ever change differently?
Perhaps in your leaving I already have.

I think upon your words
how the tide is looking
for something,
and I wonder, as you are earth
and I am water,
and we both are air…
maybe, it makes sense to go on looking together,
like the tongue of a river,
empties into
the Earth’s deeply oiled breath.

But for now, in your leaving
my heart is cast in a room
where there is snow on the window
and a blackened hearth waits
for the decrepit knock of time
as though God made the Stars running in a circle.

tokorima Taihuringa
Wellington

❆ ❆ ❆

Deteriorating

Mind
Decrepit
Clouded by stormy snow

Memory
Decrepit
Casting anonymous shadows

Eyes
Decrepit
Detecting faint specks of light cast through a window

Hands
Decrepit
Painstakingly building a nest

Body
Decrepit
Finally laid to rest

Oli Ryks
Raglan

❆ ❆ ❆

Hospice

As each rasped breath blurs up the window
He looks out to where winter gardens rest
Soil dark and freckled with sparse snow

He watches nurses darting to and fro
And fights the tightness in his chest
When laughter skitters from the door below

Skeletal branches cast dappled shadow
Reveal last summer’s ragged nest
His lips so dry, his eyes and skin sallow

But still he stands and fights to show
His appetites are not yet acquiesced
He’s mustering the strength he needs to go

Decades of restraint have not yet so
Diminished that fierce longing to invest
And feel the tingle of desire glow

To hear her laugh, her patient slow
Words reassure and head caressed
His now decrepit frame blessed to grow
Into that golden youth of long ago

Lucy D’Aeth
Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

You nest. Cast across
My window; ice clings, snow slides;
My decrepit mind.

Gabriel Field
Palmerston North

❆ ❆ ❆

Luncheon Sausage

She caught a glimpse of memory
       in the supermarket aisle
       between the hummus and the shaved deli ham.

As a child        she would stand in the wide-windowed butcher's shop
where it was cool and clean and white, like snow,
where once the neighbour-boy choked on a saveloy,
she would reach up with a child's fingers,
would take a slice of flesh-pink meat, would bring it to her mouth
and,        while her mother was busy buying mince and chicken bits,
she would nibble toothy crenulations around the edges,
until        bite by bite        by bite

it was gone.

The scene nested in her thoughts a time        then flew off
casting shadows of the past on the present moment.

Now no one ate luncheon sausage,
No one she knew.
It was too processed, too pink.
Curiously though, they still sold it
       in the supermarket aisle
       between the beetroot hummus and the ham

To decrepit and slow-       creeping nostalgia.

Emma Cole
Lower Hutt

❆ ❆ ❆

Terry Moyle
Kaiwaka

❆ ❆ ❆

The Wedding Ring Shawl

Built
on the original
site
of the old, decrepit hospital,
the new hospice is
modern and bright.
Sitting in a comfortable chair
beside the bed,
she smooths out
creases in the
faded
black and white
pattern,
peers through
her glasses,
and reads:
Cast on 165 stitches …
Knit 3, slip 1, knit 2 together
pass the slipped stitch
over
Yarn forward.
She
tears
the band
off the first ball of wool,
the colour aptly
described
as snow,
picks up a pair
of needles
and begins.
It’s been
37
years
she first knitted
this shawl,
propped up
in her hospital bed
‘Nesting?’ a nurse had inquired
stopping
to admire
the intricate pattern
and delicate work,
so fine
it could be pulled through
a
wedding
ring.
Her stiff and aching
fingers ease
a little
with the
familiar rhythm.
Her daughter’s
laboured breathing
the only
sound in the room.
She looks
out
the window
and
wonders
if
she
has
enough
time.

Jane Va’afusuaga
Apia, Samoa

❆ ❆ ❆

Winter's Hope

Dark mustered steps
Through season of least
Wained energy, half strength
Trekked short days by dull summons
repeat
repeat

Suddenly
An opportune window provokes sight
A new perspective glimpsed
Bypassing the suffocating decrepit crawl of winter bland
One lone beam cast colours of future promise

Awakening once again stirred sleepy dreams
Carried on time
Encased in hope expectant
Like a nest bursting nurturing growth
Spilling over, sliding down, mimicking melting snow

Blinding yet
Seeing afresh
Poised
To dance on the familiar
Path of Light

Kaye Clayton
Stokes Valley

❆ ❆ ❆

Choices

you can choose to cast a shadow
or a fishing line
let the wind carry you
through fire
through snow
through whatever life throws at you.


i believe we were all born old.
never delivered on the silver-platter-clean-slate we were promised
no.
we were born upon
hard
dirt
floor.
facing this world head first
history-torn tatters taken from our surroundings stuck to us
before we managed to steal our first breath


young/ decrepit
fresh/ not clean
faces with pre-furrowed brows
wrinkles never earnt
we all began life upon our knees crawling –
not yet strong enough to stand
                                   to think
                                   to feel
nor mend the hairline
slivers along our scalp where light escaped us.


the world is windy
even the breeze cuts.
covers your eyes
take refuge in trees
kept rooted deep in the soil


build nests like old crows
out of hair
      of clothes
      of words
      of actions
          education
all windows into other lives.
into other hairline paper corner tornados.


you can cast a shadow
or a fishing line.
you can carry yourself to safety or you can keep yourself home
it only takes nothing at all to ensure you stay with light
leaking out your lips.

Maya Neupane
Wellington City

❆ ❆ ❆

Nana Nap

The stitch I cast-off slips between my fingers
fine wool tendrils
listless
slip
into a nest of yarn
so now, when snow clouds bruise the sky,
I have no blanket to wrap you in.
I can no longer protect you.
These eyes see through mottled windows.
These fingers are gnarled.
These decrepit bones find the stairs too steep to climb
so you must be the one
now to create sanctum for your own.
Their names slip between my lips.
fine sweet names
slip
into kisses.

Heather McQuillan
Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

I knew a man

I knew a man who kicked me
He whispered Sorry don’t know what got into me
A new satan, that’s what, with pale green eyes and handsome
He put a mouse in a slab of bread and ate it
I should have jumped from his window and left him
Drunk, he pulled a white sheet tight around my neck
…and laughed, I laughed, he blew promises into
my ears he could never keep up with
I packed my cat. See ya
A strange nest, unravelling

I knew a man, my father, he said don’t go to university, marry
a farmer, what use a degree in philosophy? There will be babies,
anyone who studies poetry’s a pansy, not the flower

I knew a man who’d cut me off at the knees
In the snow, he said, cast your eyes around this tussock,
no humans. That kind of looking did not bring comfort
He was flirting, I felt a stab
I had an ex-husband who slammed my arm in the door
He hit our daughters in a savage fit. Never forgave himself
He died decrepit, so full of griefs and bad wine

Men with floods of booze
Men with fatal fists

Wanda Barker
Raglan

❆ ❆ ❆

Old Cane Chair

Sitting at the window reflecting on
How you blinked and your life was gone…
The nest now empty, body now decrepit
Do you regret how you cast everyone away?
Are you sleeping soundly in the bed that you made?
Can you pinpoint where it all went astray?
A shining example when much younger,
You lived a life unencumbered…
Exuberance personified.
Here you sit, personality mummified.
Bent and twisted
Callous, cold.
Life’s snow eventually took hold…
So you sit replaying memories traversed,
Locking away any happiness, it’s a curse!
In the window you reflect, awaiting the hearse.

Richard Dryden
Palmerston North

❆ ❆ ❆

The Exhibition’s Lens

some eyes are globes with no horizon
privileged beside deprived
showing the reality of their lives
defined by opulence or poverty
in images confronting & graphic
neither knows the other
yet here they hang together
inequity framed as art
in their separate worlds
worlds apart
a window on where children sleep
open tomb or sumptuous room
or the beautiful boy cast out on the street
a slum city seat his bed
they take hold of your heart
with photos almost surreal
impassively they look at you looking back
at their silent story told with wordless assaults
the overwhelmingly indulged or
the child in snow who coldly compels
the child curled in the nest of rubbish
above a dump’s putrid leach
the child in a decrepit unlit shed
nothing to conceal
does the camera lie
about the child who lives under attack
quarters destroyed struck by shells
or invent destruction written
in cause & effect deftly hung
for our cursory glance at a portrait of unrest
the young supplicant’s mute cry
gives no one absolution

Suzanne Herschell
Eastbourne

❆ ❆ ❆

Memory of Snow

I wake in the bedroom of the town house
where my sister-in-law lives,
on her own now for fifteen years.
From the wall beside the window
my bearded brother stares down,
shadow cast across his face, Snow
we called him. Blonde hair slicked back,
blue eyes, corner-crinkled, laughing into mine
— who’ll be first to blink?

He’s on the tallboy too,
bony brown knees knuckled between
decrepit blue shorts and long white walk socks
hands thrust into swaggering pockets
after his heart transplant at Green Lane.

Beside it there’s another, much younger then,
he’s wearing a white shirt and tie,
heart strong,
his arm, a nest sheltering his new fiancée,
a red rose love-pinned to her sheath dress.

Then there’s one where he’s standing
by her side, his bouffant bride, beautiful
in shy white lace, tulle veil
lifting like angel wings behind them.
He’s everywhere in this room
he’s never been in.

I shut my eyes and he’s there,
framed in our childhood.
Gotcha! he shouts, gleeful. You blinked first!
But, I argue back, I closed my eyes
for only a moment, to hold your memory in.

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr
Dunedin

❆ ❆ ❆

No-one pays attention

No-one pays attention to the lady away from her nest
talking to herself.
She casts aside the knitting between her fingers, eyes
the distant window, shouts, bangs
her fist on the table, frowns, washes
her hands snow clean, scratches
her leg, claps, clasps, feels
her pulse, one wrist then the other, opens
her bag, repacks her sandwiches, sips
her water bottle, looks at no-one.
The wall behind her is decrepit black.

John Howell
Wellington

❆ ❆ ❆

Nest

Through the window
the decrepit bones of winter
cast shadows across
the floorboards
you laid last summer

The nest, now latticed
lies silhouetted at my feet.
I bend to touch it
in some gesture of longing
for warmth.

You left last autumn, late,
but before the first frost.
The curve and weave of our bodies
deep feathered and layered
left with you.

I run my hands over the walls
planed by you.
A splinter lodges and pain
holds me here
in the last remnant of your hands.

The wind picks up.
Shadows of snow fall.
I stretch my foot into the nest.
Small twigs come loose
and tattoo my skin.

Peta Hudson
Dunedin

❆ ❆ ❆

When I Wake You

I pull down the sheet when you’re asleep
there’s a blush of a bruise where the gun rests
I long to put my finger there
but I don’t dare wake you

Remember the stingray that summer
swam under us
we ran along the pier shouting
trying to cast in front of it
I want to feel you hold the line
but I don’t dare wake you

We watched the city fire at night
from our window on Huntsbury Hill
and the twin engines on our NAC Viscount
as we crossed the Cook Strait home
I long to make that trip again
but I don’t dare wake you

You looked up from the kill
in your bush shirt
with the beast still wet
red on the snow
with fine antlers on
where the Kea nest
I go there too
but I don’t shoot
and I don’t dare wake you

You have one eye missing
and a beanie on
two decrepit jerseys and the heater off
a walker by your chair
hidden blocks of chocolate
crushed ice to wet your lips
and one last rattling breath
and I don’t want to
I really don’t
but this is when I wake you

Stuart McLaren Airey
Hamilton

❆ ❆ ❆

Cold Cross

Decrepit dwelling
Empty nest
Bustling days
put to rest

Babies born gone
and grown and died
Parents who birthed them
and lost them and cried

These things
don’t always
happen in
the perfect order

I lived to return
Last one to stand
To catch a cold breath
Unite palms of my hands

To see holy cross
kitchen light always cast
through the quartered window pane
upon the snow-dusted path

Jesus Christ
though often referenced
worked precious few miracles
at our house

I imagine my mother
still in there
I’m at the counter on a barstool
She’s braiding my hair

And the kettle is screaming
And my plaits are too tight
And though I craved the leaving
I have run back tonight.

Bee Trudgeon
Porirua

❆ ❆ ❆

Please expand

Where to start, the quark
for its twosome part? Or the neutrinos that move
through our seamless skin, or the blue whorls
of particles in the yellow stain of a bubble chamber
lining up into their nucleate flakes
of obliterate snow, or the ebb and murmuration
of flocks – locusts or birds? – or through the eye
of a camera cast from ceiling down
a ballroom scene, the parallel lines
of dark-headed men and 18th Century women in cup-cake tresses
step apart, then collide in teacup swirls,
or the high-rise tops of New York or Tokyo
forming a woman’s face of pixelated pores
through the satellite window dome
separating as you pull away, making room
for the nest we call Earth come careening through
in a line of pastel-whirls, these planets
orbiting the points of a decrepit sun, it spins on
amidst a galaxy of pinned-on stars,
and outwards more, our faces glow in the screens
we keep on finding these nebulous revolutions –
But where do we fit? Which bit?

Gail Ingram
Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

Garden in Winter

I’m walking the garden in winter
Stinging air sharpens my senses – a
chittering of cold birds,
lawn like stale, saturated sponge,
an unrelentingly olive flower bed.
Trees are black, in italics.
Decrepit gutters drip – pip, pip, pip…
Our ruby rose has hipped to hoarfrost.
Cast leaves star paths – great sodden wreaths of russet and brown.
In the vegetable patch
a sparse salting of snow spreads over
last season’s corn stalks,
drilled through cabbages, a yellowed nest of frozen broccoli.
You beckon from a window, but
I linger a while
Our winter garden feels like a friendly thing.
The wind throws an arm about my back, knuckles my parka …

Stephanie Mayne
Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Window closing

The shearwater draws her long
Wings in and swoops to feed.
Then turns to Aotearoa,
Home to breed and nest
Starving as she is. A belly
Of caps and net makes
Even the young bird
Decrepit and diseased.

Worn from wandering winds
Of ocean vinegary and warm
Her true prey dead or fled
And glittering shoals of death
Like cruel jokes caught up
In her throat instead.

At the poles the snow and ice yield
The ground cries with poisoned
Breath released, it sighs
Indifferent to all
It will endure as cold rock
If it must.
And we do not know if the die
Has been cast or whether
A window still exists.

Andrea Malcolm
Hobsonville Point

❆ ❆ ❆

Dispatches from the nest:

It moves in slowly
As fog tends to do
Since the definition of fog is ‘slowly moving disgusting clouds’
This is why we use it as a metaphor for depression.

When I was small I knew fog was magic because it was clouds you could touch
Run my fingers through it, so thick I felt I could get lost.

It took approximately ten years for me to become afraid
See the grey-scale vapour for its tint
How it creeps, slowly, as fog tends to do
Til it's been six weeks under the blankets
And you've become the scary thing
Rotten with dirty dishes, decrepit with wasted days.

So we watch behind the window
Me and my cloud-cast brain
Left from a lifetime of believing in magic
Waiting for fog to turn into snow.

Eliana Gray
Ōtepoti

❆ ❆ ❆

Dwelling Place

under a full moon
I wander through my neighbourhood
noting most houses have lighted windows
watching the rugby, I guess
I am the only one out
no cars, no animals, no barking dogs
an alien world
of winter without snow
I name the inhabitants
I don't know them
what do they do at night?
do they read, watch television
or have some unusual hobby?
my immediate neighbour
carves up animals for meat
I hear his saw whirring at 2am
he has already slept a beer fuelled sleep
the moon casts an eerie glow on iron roof
eaves house the swallows' nest
I disturb them as I walk into my decrepit dwelling
the first sign of life
in these wee small hours

Judith McNeil
Kaipara Hills

❆ ❆ ❆

Ageing Alchemy

I discovered that I don’t have a penchant for
ageing. Small flags fly in my nest
of unsynchronized synapses. No Surrender.
Actually the brain has blurred, due no doubt
to my perceived Peter Pan lifestyle – somewhere –
last seen fumbling in nevernever land.
Surrounded often by young men & women
Who adapt themselves to my slowed responses?
With kindness & care. He’s a little addled y’know,
and his vision’s impaired.
Shot more like it. Mostly it resembles
a snow storm through an opaque window.
Observing myself, cast in decrepitude
Silently becoming yesterday’s draw card.
To offer what? To this frenetic, energetic, million
miles of hyper.
I take a Chinese cookie, and after opening
carefully, finding the mystery message
It’s blank.

Lee Thompson
Dunedin

❆ ❆ ❆

A chance encounter

In 1983 I stood on a platform in Spain,
where trains are late or early.
The dust was full of summer and the plenitude of life.
There were shiny green leaves, and snow–white buildings,
and I was ten, nested in a bubble of family
without feeling lost amongst the difference.
With my pencil I churned out technical drawings
of Spanish trains: blue curvaceous TERs,
and TALGOs, silver-sleek with crimson trim.
That afternoon, a wine-soaked English voice
rang from the window of a departing carriage:
God bless all you mad Kiwi bastards!
Standing next to us at this decrepit junction
was the mad Kiwi bastard in question,
a seedy character with a five day beard,
sunburned and heavy jawed, who talked
with the candour of someone far from home,
cast into the company of his own kind.
I recognized his marginal quality.
There was something about a marriage.
My mother said later, he was running away.

Victor Billot
Dunedin

❆ ❆ ❆

In good time

We were well into the nesting phase.
I’d prettied a decrepit cot with saffron and buttercup paint samples that even at fifty-percent-off we couldn’t afford.
We had one of those fights that you know halfway through you can’t come back from.
I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke he was gone. It took him a few more weeks to move out but he was already gone. Right then.
Vamoosed.
I half-dreamt-half-sensed him slinking back after dark to wrestle shoes and saucepans into newspaper shrouds and out to the car. Boxing up our brief pas-des-deux days.
And then silence.
Into which she exploded, early, trailing blood.
Like the gunshots we’d heard outside the window just before sunrise that night we talked until dawn.
Like the surprising scent of new snow falling weeks before winter onto next door’s pine trees.
Like an unexpected surge in the Earth’s gravitational pull.
All this at once.
A baby.
Suede-fuzzed curlicue ears.
Lips parted spewing kitten mewlings.
Miniature fingers too easy to snap, snagged on the frayed edge of her impossibly tiny lemon terrycloth sleeve.
So light.
And so heavy.
Cast so suddenly into my arms.
Too early in the season.

Elspeth Tilley
Wellington

❆ ❆ ❆

Paper wasp

Window-framed moonlight
casts fractured shadows
of the wasp nest
suspended from the eave
umbels and cones shade
across damaged flooring

polistes chinensis antennalis
makes pulp from wood
chewed with spit
male and female together
build nests
all geometric cavities
hexagonal perfection
share foraging    feeding young
and they sting    and sting

Moonlight through windows
your face is snow    close-shaded
cold-pale    unwelcome
in this worn decrepit room
the home of our disordered lives
battered words    shattered skin

light behind cloud
patterned to chaos    my memories
a snowfall of scattered pain
but brightness finally comes
my bones may be broken down
my heart hold ancient bruises
but I will cast you out
I will at last
sting

Alexandra Fraser
Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Twin Flame of Catalonia

Whispered goodbyes in London's snow
perforce, half a world to go
Clara flew from her adopted nest
fate drew her ever west

Once a decrepit relic of our colonial past
now witness to an ethereal cast
Through the Civic's window he saw
a goddess, past dreams and more

Welcoming her to this hallowed place
a touch of hands, a lifted face
Then her voice so true
"I know you"

Grant Douglas Philpott
Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

From above

Upon the thermals, I glide and I dance
Freedom if only given the chance

From high above, I glimpse my forest below
Beneath the mountains capped with snow

But I hear the call and I know he’ll wait
For me to return, to what is my fate

The window of my world will narrow
My aim to him true as an arrow

Secret like a nest, hidden from all eyes
Decrepit and sad is its disguise

His cabin sits amongst shadows cast
‘Twill be my home, ‘til I breathe my last

Sheryn Smith
Wairoa

❆ ❆ ❆

Talk of a Season

‘It's not winter,
it's love that's a
decrepit season’, he said
dusting off the off cuts
he was picking out of the
wood pile by the shed.
'I'd be surprised if we don't
see snow tonight! A real
Queenstown summer!', and he
laughed, and his hand went into
his shirt pocket as if putting
his laugh away with his Zig-Zag
cigarette papers, the packet yellow
as a gingko leaf ripe with autumn.
The shed window was
like a dark mirror, a swallow
flashed in it before I saw it swerve
Above my own head.
‘We had a nest of them in there
last year', he went on. ‘They
build those nests with mud and spittle,
solid as a hive; they’re smart
for such a little bird, sharp as tacks!’
‘Damn!, That hurt; it’s a bugger
trying to do anything with this
cast on… my own fault,
she pissed me off so much I
whacked my fist down on the edge
of the table, fractured my wrist’.
‘Anyway, young fella, you’ve been
To university, so, you tell me…’
Far as he saw it, however you
defined love, it never improved
the ‘product’ even one
iota.

Peter Le Baige
Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Return from Puysegur

through the wheelhouse window
smeared with water and salt,
crystal blue eyes, cast the horizon,
sighting snow upon Mt Anglem
and Foveaux swells,
about his boat – the Sandra Fay

flannel shirt, 70’s side burns,
and substantial hands,
that farmed the land
and now fish the sea,
are at the helm.
deck smelling of cod and cray,
pots decrepit with rust,
fish in ice

they push through sea.
the hands steer past, Dog Island,
into, Bluff Harbour,
as arthritis niggles his knee,
and seagulls on beacons and rocks, flock,
eager, to nest near,
the returning, Sandra Fay

Sandra Lock
Invercargill

❆ ❆ ❆