Given Poems – National Poetry Day 2025 – Adults

Here is our selection of the entries for Best Poem for the Given Words competition for National Poetry Day. They all had to include the following five words: pair, endure, lightfast, hold, and justice.

You can read the winning poem Venus, Don’t You Laugh At Me by Sadie Yetton and the poems Lightfast by Gail Zing, Nō Te Paruparu, Nō Te Purapura | Of the Mud, Of the Seed by Cindy Kurukaanga, and Pinhole by Renee Liang—which all received a Special Mention—along with the judge's comments here and the poems from the Under-16's category here.

❆ ❆ ❆

Cataloguing the Beach
for John Allison

A pair of muscle-crusted black buoys,
sea biscuits by the dozen, a riddle of

three-pronged footprints. You taught me
to look, and look again. The day you leave,

I begin cataloguing the beach. At the water’s
edge, a shark pup struggles as the tide goes

out. Thrashing in an inch of water, twisting
in on itself, hollowing out a sandy snare. I

grab its tail, hold firm, push it headfirst
toward deeper water. It doesn’t need much.

Just three-fingers of sea to re-float and swim
away. This is all fiction, and it is all true. I am

walking with the great mystery, tiptoeing
with shadows in the midst of a blue sun-

rise. Look up. The sky is ribbed in a chalice
of clouds v-ing out from beyond the hills. I know

our friendship is lightfast. The way time is
a myth that we agree to endure and justice

is salt in unseen wounds. What is there to see
this day? Tuatua shells scattered in the tidal path,

enough driftwood to build several beach huts,
waves tumble in, and the sun rises once again.

Jenna Heller
Ōtautahi Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

Whalefall

the days feel different now
and I wonder if that’s because of the concrete turtle.

a new addition, apparently. eight dollars of lightfast green and a virgin to my memory.
you turn it around and discover a snail chewing minerals
and agitated ommatophores retreat at your caress.

we hold hands around the garden.
they smell foul – geraniums we crumpled between eggshell nails. two fingers
are glued to my palm in a silent luck charm – a small justice
buzzing against their blossom milk trap.

‘My daddy’s gonna make my bedroom yellow,’ you tell me.
your words are stuffed between cranberry crackers and feta.
cute, I think, you’re cute. you’re my ninth birthday
teeth jammed into frozen eclairs and eyes bright in the summer sweat.

knees bowed, you surprise a pair of shubunkins.
their glowing fins vanish amidst weed and scum
as scales rot into stillwater. With every flash of apricot I feel foreign
and dead to this hobbyist pond. it was a flowerbed of my mother’s when I blew out the candles.
I’ll endure it. this golden world is the only one you know.

‘I used to live here,’ I say.
you may not smell the smoke,
but I still do.

Thalia Peterson
Aranui, Ōtautahi Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

Varanasi Incantation

Sunlight slivers across the river,
absorbed into oily waters of the Ganga.
The boat has a silent prow,
slipping through the mother river.

Being cleansed in turbid waters,
this holy immersion of daily karma,
merges Varanasi’s aliveness and death.
There’s noise enough from the river’s edge.
Bodies burned on the grim gravel,
ashes scattered, sinking to the slow dark depths
as we glide through the human flotsam
of this other-worldly stream.

This ceremonious day of dying;
the sparking justice of embers,
igniting flames of burning fires,
consuming bodies wrapped
in lightfast white cotton.
Seared flesh, cinders and fragmented scraps
of burnt cloth, blow into the wind.
Bodies, once of earthly living or holiness;
each holding a lifetime of karma,
consumed by the body burners,
reduced to ashes. Vishnu be merciful.

Mourners, in pairs, chant blessings,
Sadhus lay bindi on forehead chakras.
Families grieve and weep, enduring
the miasma of acrid palls of smoke,
and smouldering charred remnants.
Lord Krisna’s beautiful, wandering cows’
luminescence bring benign reminders
that life is measureless.

Descended from Heaven
this divine river flows; melding
generations in its godlike essence.
Strewn flowers, ash, bones,
prayers, and incantations
skimming murky tides of Varanasi Ganga Ma.

Lee Thomson
Ōtepoti Dunedin

❆ ❆ ❆

Gatekeepers

They speak of justice
As if it were theirs to give
Coins minted in back rooms
Never by hands of the makers

We hold our breath
At the gallery’s edge
Palms full of hues
Stories carved from ancestral bone

But the gate is gilded
With credentials and quiet nods
While our truths wait
Lightfast as tapa in the Pasifika sun
Refusing to fade

We endure
The silence between rejections
The echo of not quite
The ache of being almost

Yet somewhere, a pair of hands
Break glass to let the light in
And the mosaic begins
Not in permission
But in resolution

Dessa BLUU
Coromandel, Waikato

❆ ❆ ❆

of Mārama over Hauturu and palpitations of Matariki stars

My secret occupation is to be human
and overlook the enduring stretch,
the crossing flexing fabrics
of oceanic swell, wave beat and ripple shimmer
that joins Aotea to Taranga to Mokohinau to Te Whara
to Te Mangawhai through the hazy mist mask of mid-winter warm
at 430+ppm CO 2 and rising
when a pair of board riders feel the clean crisp rush
of the cool vibe, spooling out in threads of connection
and shared experience,
and in this instance, Kraft Heinz Wattie’s have captured the niche place
on a brightly colored lightfast ceramic brick picnic bench and table
that expresses our communality through baked beans in tomato sauce
(with or without sausages), a chance to hold on to moments
that will never come again;
as we listen to and celebrate the legal arguments and songs
of our Pacific Island neighbours at the International Court of Justice.

Piet Nieuwland
Whangarei

❆ ❆ ❆

Dose

In the morning, first thing
take two tablets to endure
the euphoria after surviving
another sleepless night.

That dream of spoke-shaving
clouds to fit them neatly into
the blue building block of sky
will haunt you later, unless
two more pills can sandpaper
out the jagged edges.

Your mother’s blood that
runs in you is thinning daily
from the warfarin her doctor
calculates on her abacus.

Your neighbour has cancer.
You father died of a burst
aorta. Your colleagues sneak
arsenic into your kale shakes.

The bus is a germ that moves
along a clogged vein leading
into the city’s last heartbeat.

Strike a match
to hide
your reflection.

There is no justice
in who gets shelter.

This life each minute
is a pass-the-parcel
where it’s never your turn.

Stop in the park next to
the homeless guy: that’s you
in 10 years. Hold onto your soul,
give him a pair of your pills
sit and re-draw the shape
and history of the trees
whose hearts are hidden
deep in the lightfast bark.

Lincoln Jaques
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Dotterel

Appointed superintendent of military roads at Porirua in 1845 Englishman Walter Mantell dons frock coat and mottled waistcoat, learns te reo Māori to instruct labourers bartered from Ngāti Toa and soldiers who have no choice in black-powder blasting, broad-axe, and adze to slice whenua for clinker and topple rimu for corduroy planking to hold back the mud.

He keeps a journal, field notes, observations of moa bones disinterred, birds half-seen. At Pāuatahanui he notes a nesting pair stooping and watching with cocked skulls, conspicuous on mid-grey legs. He dots his page with dotterel, dotterel, dotterel, the idiot Sussex bird of his youth that flies on lightfast wings halfway around the world but is always lost.

Walter’s roads endure. He ascends as commissioner for extinguishing native titles in Te Waipounamu, assigning Kai Tahu treasures to friends in government. His naming persists too; we miscall the tūturiwhatu still.

A hollowness in his bones pipes him back to Chelsea, where his doubts about justice seed repeated appeals asking where are the schools, the hospitals, the reserves he parroted in his promises? He migrates south once more to push for decency but it will be a century after his death before redress begins.

Elspeth Tilley
Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington

❆ ❆ ❆

we are a pair of apples
with soft spots –
yellowed flesh in
the gaps of your teeth.
we endure birds pecking
at our lightfast skin and
the noxious justice of
pesticide.
this tree holds us
until we are ripe.

Courtney Speedy
Tasman

❆ ❆ ❆

#584 The Treaty Principles Bill and More

In my hands I held justice
    as she danced like sands running
    down a Far North beach.
Her set of scales tipped and
                                            tilted,
clinking like a pair of singing tūī.

I moved like I was knitting
               the sea,

to endure was     to bring two
ends
    together     to weave and
flow. All of Kaitaia and beyond
waited, breath stiff like sappy honey
in our throats.

We’ve all been here before, the past
tells us so in lightfast pigments.
Change stood on the tips
                               of my fingers, toes curled

over the edge.
The finality of her decision
remained to be seen.

Ashlee-Ann Sneller
Paraparaumu

❆ ❆ ❆

12C

Most stars don’t go supernova
They go quietly, their light fast fading,
Dim red surface, white-hot center, as they
Exhale carbon into the universe.

Those atoms forms the basis of the
Base pairs of DNA twisting inside
Every living thing that will
Exhale carbon into the air.

We industrialized, star reaching,
But now a toll endures,
From the burning of fossil fuels that
Exhaust carbon into the atmosphere.

Is it just ice
That we lose in the melting glaciers
In the rising sea levels that threaten atoll nations

Is it justice
That the poor pay for the wealthy
And famine comes to the most vulnerable
And our gravest lightfast warnings fade

Resist exhaustion
Feel the anger in your center, white-hot
Hold tightly the tightness in your chest
Let us not go quietly

Exhale.

Erin Zampaglione
Ōtautahi Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

private space

I am not interested in lightfast
plastic I want faded I
want pretty I saw

a rusted motorcycle uncrashed
old house and gasoline can paint
peeling horseshoes pairs

of naked women taped to the
garage walls, I mean this without
judgement, the lack of justice
is cinema          if I
could climb through and become
a face on the other side,
brighten him, could be even prettier than

pairs horseshoes
peeling paint can
gasoline and house old
uncrashed motorcycle rusted

a saw he’d fade
smooth I could hold it, endure my own
incompatibility. I of clean rooms,
eternal plastic, Nothing

Bugs Sullivan
Ōtautahi Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

without

we were pair-bound, you and i
together for forty years           until
scraps of you           slid to the floor

i see your outline…
in the garden moving through the lemon
bite of midnight, your skin, once lightfast, i think

to reach through the kitchen
window, to pull you back from the void
           but my heart has been felled

to its knees & fears it will not
recognise your reflection

receding —


last sunday… i cradled cream
chrysanthemums, the cluster that cried
in a corner when

brilliant red freckled
the counter           i sat

in my car outside the cemetery
open-mouthed           wounded           feeling
fractured           for failing
to understand what you endured —

a mind unravelling as

darkness drew down & you
could no longer hold
life’s gleam           you contemplated…

                                                       nothingness.

did you wonder what it would taste like?

orange, bittersweet?

i sat on the seat among moss & earth
rearranging headstones, learning their names

but… i could not name yours, for we are split
apart now, my mouth is stitched & the
justice-oath we once spoke

is silenced           so i think instead
of summers to come

covering your absence.

Kim Martins
Kerikeri

❆ ❆ ❆

Remaining

Shower my eyes,
Cascade into the iris.
Each pupil dark,
One of a pair.
Ingressing,
Egressing.
My fingers bend fruitlessly,
Spilling carbon ink
To do justice
To your face.
Wet tongues to fingers,
A page flickers,
Dogear.
Will it be lightfast?
Will it last?
A precaution,
False hypothesis.
Cherry tomato,
Perched between rows,
Blistering like the sun,
Bursting like an avalanche.
Endure the throat,
Circle the lining.
We remain,
Still,
Continuously,
To be and to hold.
Lamplight;
I bask in inside glows,
Pale skin not so susceptible
Under beams.
All-nighter;
Ruthless bedsheets
Like performers' silk.
Weighted eyes,
Still those pupil pairs.
Parting,
An exodus,
And entering again.

Liberty Armstrong
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Octopoet

The octopoet sat
phone squelched in hand
tentacles groping for muses
in oceans of sand

diving down deep
justice, death?
hunting blubbery themes
truth’s salty breath.
to hold, and to carve
to shape into herds
of briny, sea-sweet
surges of words

avoiding drowned tropes
…of course.
self-indulgent, or meta-aware
like, poems on poems
or, youthful despair

first: punny pairs
‘ghoul friends’ fighting
with ‘venomous stairs’
then: similes piled high
till tables bent
a suckling feast
but scant nourishment
desperately: drenched clichés
enduring a flute out of tune
its meaning as dark
as lightfast noon

eventually: words lie
wasteland-white
snowflakes on snow
pale pointless echoes
with nowhere to go

and crowds sighed
at his woven tales
failing noise
screaming and whales.
they scratched heads
confused by meaning
that bled broken,
like eggs

for it hid there
from the start

felt, but unseen
the octopus thrashing
in the poet’s machine
twisting tropes, bloating lines
sliming each stanza
with wet clotted rhymes

so, with one last sip
of the desert breeze
he shrugged,
left the octopus roiling
in its alphabet seas

he’ll learn one day
rid of that weight
that one pen
crisp.
clean.
and dry.
is better than eight

James Riley
Masterton

❆ ❆ ❆

Mum Genes

Like clown trousers
this pair once dangled from bony hips.
Back in fashion, now they fit –
hide stretch-marked blubber
I’m meant to hate –
sometimes I do.

Pretty floral pockets
fray, lose lightfastness.
Heavy denim endured –
flung in top loaders
bashed by agitators
tumbled dry.
Warped ideas of love
trapped in the weft.

Weave submits, returns,
again.
Supports obstinate flesh that wants
to chuck a wobbly.
No elastane to degrade and snap
at unruly bellies that broke
the contract
to bounce back.

My 7 year old says
he’s strong, a ninja.
C-section, tumour excision scars
aren’t tough;
I couldn’t feel the cuts.

Mother-in-law achieved births correctly –
a caesar cheats.
Of course, she grants,
I didn’t mean to be weak, it’s my genes.
I want to shriek ‘What’s easy about a torn
womb?

What about my mother who laboured,
drug free, till male obstetricians
diagnosed failure
                               yanked
                                                my
                                                            body
                                                                         from
scalpel sliced guts?’

She taught me to smother rage.
Bite my tongue.
No justice in life, get on with it.
Fold laundry, wet into dry,
hold myself so needles pierce
straight through
no trace.

Dad snarled
‘I bet you’re fat,
just like your mother.’
Words leave no scars.

Rachel Douglass
Rolleston, Canterbury

❆ ❆ ❆

Larthia speaks
(After the Regolini-Galassi Tomb, in Cerveteri, Italy.)

                       truth is,
I never wanted an afterlife,
laid out resplendent as an oriental ibis
in my ornately carved sarcophagus
with my gilded bowls and perfume bottles,
my precious pair of painted ostrich eggs—
a scraping of what was tucked away with me
deep in the dark lungs of the earth,
             the hot day of my death

                       and yet,
my bones were fettered by gold
at my own request: lions and sphinxes
adorn the plate laid across my breast,
my necklaces hold weighted beads,
and I feel my belt and fibula
burn golden in the dark.
I’d chosen nothing but the lightfast best
             to prime me for eternity—

                       though I didn’t realise
eternity would last so long! I fancy
I can hear the dust accrue, distinguish
one shade of darkness from another,
feel the desiccating pallor of my bones,
the withering of the mind that happens when
there’s nothing new to think, and endure
a further closing in as I’m buffered
             by the mounds of my descendants

                       —but oh! that I could entreat the gods
to grant me one last small justice, to serenade me
back, just once, through the ever more distant
glittering threshold
             of my beforelife

Denise O’Hagan
Sydney, Australia

❆ ❆ ❆

Post-truth era

They shed truths’ meanings like psoriasis skin flakes,
mandarin hobgoblins run hither and thither
collecting those scaly truths as new synonyms,
in random pairs, pegging them together, throwing them
into their wonky word wheelbarrows;
justice and prejudice,
honesty, deceit,
integrity, evil,
kindness and ruthlessness,
wheeled away to the sorting hold,
maybe for re-pairing and reissuing,
maybe not.

Lightfast truths,
those huge irrefutables that will never fade,
that will endure for ever,
cannot be reframed;
birth, death, suffering, joy,
those they’ve stored in the inner vault
double-locked,
never again to see the light of day.
There is, however, a rumour,
a crack in that crypt
a slim version of hope
plans an escape

Sue Barker
Waipu

❆ ❆ ❆

Tell me something true
i.m. Jessie Riethmuller

These scour-end days of winter:
rebarbative.
We endure heel turns in the muck

of ground unfreezing. I say, spring,
hold!,
till narcissus remantles, till a close

and heated room hallucinates
fresh flare
to relumine our complaining.

It’s the view that irritates
or so I claim,
window to a window in a wall,

such a pair. I can be your eyes
here, girl, light
in the window, bulb in my throat,

while in the next street, protest meets
golden hour,
terraces aperitif to justice, breath

for those who love but see no more,
breath to fill
the forest floor, winter’s last breath

of body rising up to meet itself.
Revivify
the golden boy, pull him back from the

pond. I can be your eyes here girl,
signs and wonders
lightfast, even if (rebarbative) you’re gone.

Megan Clayton
Ōtautahi Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

Rough Justice

what can we make of the carved ivory elephants
enduring souvenir status
on everywoman’s mantlepiece

stood nose to tail
in descending fractals
like a lineup of heads of state

what can we make of the rare-as sea snail
everyman shelled out for
in a lightfast beach shack

boiled alive
shell etched into a fabulous
fishy scene

what can we make of Vlad the invader and stage-diver Donny
the pair of them

Disney on ice

holding the handshake for everyone’s screens

smile, go on, say ceasefire
Crimea river laughs Vlad

Anita Arlov
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Tree Poem

While falling from the pine tree limb
The thought occurs to me
I cannot tell if I just fell
Or got thrown by a tree

Unsure of what I did to earn
The pine tree's lightfast ire
I contemplate on times my Dad
Has set its cones on fire

What justice is there to be had
From casting me away
I only thought you looked alone
And came outside to play

I know I had a solid hold
And my footing was sure
Perhaps the tree wanted to see
Whether I could endure

And then I realize that I
Have not yet hit the ground
Still bracing for the fall to end
I shyly look around

Expecting dirt and fallen cones
My landing felt too soft
A pair of branches underneath
Still holding me aloft

Levi Lewis
Palmerston North

❆ ❆ ❆

The lies we live by

What a pair we are:
You,
who lied
despite promising yourself
you never would…

and me,
the liar
I promised myself
I would never be…

We are raised
with promises
made by those
raised with those
same promises
and so know them to be a lie:

That
goodness endures.
That
justice is lightfast.
That
if you hold true
to principle
you will prosper…

And yet
goodness
disappears
as justice fades
and the principled
are left under the rubble
of indifference…

And still we will promise
our children
the same lies
because
our liars
also taught us to
coddle them
with fairy stories
thinking them too young
for the truth.

We think reality
is something
one should wake to
in their own time…

but that time is
too often
too late.

What a pair we are:
You,
who lied
despite promising yourself
you never would…

and me,
the liar
I promised myself
I would never be…

Russell 'Hazlito' Black
Nelson

❆ ❆ ❆

Sonnet on a faded sheet

These dyed cottons last a summer month
Before their lightfast lies are found by sweat
But parents’ parents’ twine endured the brunt
Of war and weeping, winters brash and wet,
The fables that we hold have stubborn root
And pray with twisting gesture at the cradle
Till blinded to the texture of the truth
We give dry justice to the choking cable.
If what we sow is never to suffice
Beneath the fuming wisdoms we are sold,
Forget how we outgrew the well-paired vice
Now dulled among the gleaming tales of old,
Has each new generation many threads
Some snap, but others lengthen in their stead.

Loredana Podolska-Kint
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Too familiar

We eschewed the matching three
piece suite ad instead collected
widely across the decades.

We banked on disarray and thumbed
our nose at Sunday best.

We buried all images of wars in the tv
commercials.

Hoping to slip out from underneath
reborn like a pair of newly minted
coins ready to make our way in the
world.

It turns out we were not as lightfast as
we had thought

To endure we find ourselves holding
on to shadows in the corners of the room.

Our eyes closed while politicians
continue to call for justice

And children still run screaming
under fire.

Rosana Vakatini
Perth, Western Australia

❆ ❆ ❆

Savage Tech

'Abandon hope all ye who enter here' Mum says;
In these last days of her good old age
we voyage together – to the computer room.
Here we find her cast in blue light.
We, who plague her buttons and ports come seeking > permission to re
enter the walled city of Mum’s email.
The servant printer sits dumb at her elbow. It is only she who decides when
he is to rouse, march.
She, the queen of our future > holds passcodes >in her hard drive belly.
She begins with a show of power dimming the screen.
We clamber over thorn covered walls. Reach settings.
I want to ask Mum why our Maoriness was buried;
Instead I must ask,
The password? The last one was Lightfast maybe 72?
‘What fresh hell is this?’ Mum says.
At the crossroads of good age and bad, captchas cover signposts.
Prove to us you’re human
‘There’s no justice in this beast’ Mum says.
My mother’s tech burden is my own. My swag is heavy with it.
Hold please the apple man says.
'You need to pair it with another device'
We endure.
In these last days of her good old age.

Claris Harvey
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

Enduring

We are taught to hold our pain,
no matter the salted tang
on inner cheeks, or the epicentre
at our core.

The horse-hoof kick to a hip
the writhing snake
along a spine, the hop
of a gammy knee
melt skin and bone to pair with my brain,
eject my spirit as if this rocket
ride no longer needs me.

I want to perform its exorcism, tear
my shirt off, slice
through my freckled chest, crack
ribs open and inspect
the four chambers
beating at a rate I
have not decreed.

I splay my lightfast body
under the July and January sun,
but the clouds know
where to find me.
I try to dupe my nerves
but I am too frayed.
I reboot my mind
but am already disconnected.

I crawl across the carpet,
fingers as tentacles outstretched
seeking the foiled pack, seeking
a pill’s justice.

Anna Hoek-Sims
Ōtepoti Dunedin

❆ ❆ ❆

Independence
 Day

You
 are six-foot-four, but reduced
to
 the size of a calming pill.

I
 am anxiously tracking
your
 avatar, in its cruising disc.

Endure
 a terrifying moment when
you
 remain, briefly suspended –

a
 lightfast spot,
under
 laser focus –

stuck
 to the double-yellow
line
 outside your destination.

Calm
 myself with the 1980s
PBX
switchboard mantra:

'Please
 hold
while
 I connect your call.'


Back
 then, receptionists were
the
 witches who spellbound our unions.

Marie
 would have
talked
 me through this,

if
 she'd lived long enough
to
 embrace the digital world

(and
 I know she would
have
 done that, for you).


If
 there was any
justice
 for the lonely,

patchy
 cellphone coverage
would
 be obsolete already;

the
 twentieth-century office
girlfriends
 we partied with

would
 not die
in
 car crashes;

teenagers
 slipping off-grid
wouldn't
 trigger PTSD,

spark
 visions of flaming
chickens
 coming home to roost.


I
 am sucked into smoking,
pixelated
 stasis,

until
 our devices
pair
 again.

Bee Trudgeon
Porirua

❆ ❆ ❆

Kōtuku Moana II

On the deck of the last old fishing shack, we talk into the dark. Justice blaring Because we are your friends / You’ll never be alone again. Reefton gin.

Leo in his favourite pair of flannelette pajamas with his bottle of milt. Discuss collective consciousness, America, what Robert Haas said about loss. Invent a cocktail called Viscous Meniscus.

This lightfast tenderness. Kōtuku on the wing

Years later, the polaroid you took will bring a pang of nostalgia for this summer when we drove from Nelson to Lake Brunner listening to Badjelly and Dingle Dangle Scarecrow over and over and we won’t find words for that feeling it brings about what holds fast; endures. What falls away

(Someone said just the other day how you never know when it’s going to be the last. The last feed, the last afternoon they fall asleep on your chest, the last bottle of milk, the last time you pretend to be tuataras together…)

*

In the bath, Leo asks What if I give you my whole heart, and now you give me your whole heart? Tucking him in later, he whispers, When I am old, will you still be here?

How we tether. We tear—

Annabel Wilson
Swannanoa, Canterbury

❆ ❆ ❆

Questions at a Britomart Bus Stop at 5pm

How long has it been like this
for you, Sir?
Eggs cracked across the cream blue,
I quite like the runniness, Sir,
pairs well with the salt of the viaduct
but do you feel the yolk
fall on you?
Do the granules sting like venomous maggots?
Is that why you grate your ribs
against the concrete, or
is your skin coarse
enough to last, Sir?

Has it always been like this
for you, Sir?
Seeing the world on your side,
the divorced pair: the earth and sky, turning
a blind eye both bound by the concrete
kiss of infidelity that
you now
endure, Sir?

Do you know
we know
all about you, Sir?
Every 3 years I hear
about you, Sir,
through the radio and the mothers and the
skaters and the politicians in the prams,
they all talk
about plating justice
for you, Sir.

Perhaps you detest us for expecting
your gratitude, Sir?
When we flick and hurl gold booger
into lightfast plastic
post you on the net
holding you choking tears as the catch
of the day, letting you go,
saying water saves, but maybe
it feels more like
spit, Sir?

Joanne Kim
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

❆ ❆ ❆

the mess of the world

the aunties hold court
on the back doorstep
shelling peas, putting the world to rights
a thumbnail slices open a pod
plink plink plink
seeds drop like bullets
into copper bottom pot
empty shells chucked to the chooks
the kids run riot on the lawn

the aunties speak of politics, poverty, peace
this blimen’ useless government
(she’d use stronger language
but it’s the Lord’s day),
          who loves righteousness and justice
          the earth is full of his unfailing love

they speak of a cousin
who needs a haircut and a job
and to pull his trousers up
they speak of the cost of living
milk three ninety-nine at the corner dairy
and Shayla needs new schoolshoes

they speak of rich white men
strutting like a pair of puffed-up turkeys
shaking hands on red carpets
as cameras flash
as bombs drop
as babies die

an auntie’s bargain chemist boxed-dyed hair
shimmers in the sun, lightfast, fade-resistant
she rises, smooths out her Sunday dress
and puts on the roast
gives thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
          his steadfast love endures forever

I think, if there is a God
he should’ve put
the aunties in charge
of the mess of the world

Melanie Koster
Ōtautahi Christchurch

❆ ❆ ❆

Continue reading the winning poems along with the judge's comments here and the poems from the Under-16's category here.