Not new, but still running
Grass clippings stuck to bare
and wet legs, the sun letting off
gun shots from the sky,
here, and probably not for long
you were small and things
like going rather quickly down
a hill were so exciting you shrieked
the sound became fragments
of crystal, which became a vase
which held the flowers of that afternoon
they and you will be gone soon
and I am learning to be ok with that.
Microwave
Taking photos of reflections in the sea
everything is louder at night
you’re singing what should’ve been a song
and I am both lost in a corn field and
cooking dinner in the kitchen
look up damn it, look up and see her
she is right there in front of you and yet
monkeys are sent to space instead of us or
at least before us and drones bomb acquired
targets on scrambled cell phone screens
taillights tell me there is road up ahead
then they vanish around a corner
all you want is the love you heard in the rain
and I’m both too close and too far away
to give it.
Hayden Pyke was born and raised in the Waikato though currently lives with his partner and two kids on the ancestral whenua of Te Kawerau ā Maki in Waitākere, Auckland. His whakapapa goes back to Europe and the Jewish people. He writes the odd poem or spaghetti bolognese of words late at night when everyone’s asleep. Shalom.