Tag Archives: mortality

Poetry

Hot bread

Every drop-off then was the smell 
of hot bread from the ovens 
behind the factory walls, made grey 
in the memory by it always being wet
and dark, head-lights on. 

When I drive past the road today
the smell of fresh baked bread
still breaks out of those same walls, 
now Newberry’s Funeral Home,
where the ovens are hotter and sealed tight. 

For no more than the symmetry, 
it’s at Newberry’s I can be dropped-off
on a weekday, when there’ll be a fight 
for parks, and everyone oblivious 
to the smells and memories of years ago.
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Poetry

Beneath Hikurangi

Cicadas singing 
in the fire of the sun. 
We used to think 

they lived so briefly 
and it was too easy 
for the mynahs 

to catch them 
in their yellow beaks, 
hold them for a moment, 

still singing; 
no wild struggle or hardly 
a change in pitch.

After we learnt 
they lived for years 
underground, it wasn’t 

so bad. Now, listening 
to the cicadas 
in the crystal space 

of early summer,
the hill, always there, 
cut-silhouette on the horizon,

we’re happy enough 
in our grand mediocrity.
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