Simon Lewis

Our Emotions


Fortunately
things haven't been so great since then.
I was literally at your feet,
from each end of the bed
we regarded each other.

After intimacy, what privacy,
we can last this long.




Rolf Harris Was Here


Australia is a country. Australia is a country
of waterholes and visions. The Kiwi bludges
a cigarette off two aboriginal men

in the winter night train. Which way is it
travelling? Australia's different enough.

In a paddock, a horse snorts and stops.

The Kiwi can see a city across the harbour.
This is a land, after all, of spaces,

filling him in. He flies from the Powerhouse
along the city streets, Pitt, George, stands
to gaze up at the clouds dancing.
The heat here on the turf.
The Kiwi sleeps beside a wall, beside
a suburb as wealthy as Heaven.

But he doesn't stop there, he glides
along a street of gas stations.
He sleeps, dreams, under a power pole.
The George River runs past the artillery range,
a helicopter or two buzzes the old farmhouse.
It is either fire or water, here.
The man in the desert dreams
of the man in Antarctica.




A Little Play

It was all intent
as if a cat stalking a bird.
The poem would fly away--surely not.
The poem wanted to get caught
that time.


for Patsy Nevill



Simon Lewis is 49 and has been publishing since 1976. Once upon a time a Statistics NZ clerk, he lives in a Mental Health halfway house in Auckland, New Zealand.




Peter Olds Meg Campbell Kirin Cerise Simon Lewis Graham Bishop Mahinarangi Tocker