This poem is published in breath, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025. Does it hark back to all our years of camping with our kids? Maybe, except that the poem is entirely fictional.
The tent
He stands there framed by the tent door
except that it’s not a frame, it’s flapping
and bagging, and rips round his arm.
His face jerks in and out of shadow
because they’ve put up the tent under the trees
and leaf shadow’s rushing and shaking
all over them.
She says, Whose crazy idea was this,
camping out in a gale force wind?
The whole tent’s going to blow away.
He says nothing. He’s heard it before.
That’s why they’ve come, to have a break
some Montessori peace, she calls it,
but he calls it, Anything to stop her complaining.
He’s holding the torch, and the flapping door
suddenly slaps it out of his hand
and it falls in an arc, a fast/slow fall,
wheeling over onto the tent floor.
Light tracks across the rumples of fabric
and something about this tiny landscape
of cracks and crevices, light and shadow,
makes them both stop.
They stare at it, then he kneels down
and picks up the torch
and she is silent.
