OTHER NAMES

dissident troops
who wanted to keep their weapons
to topple Saddam

reservists
crisped in their vehicles
on the road to Baghdad

citizens
of Mogadishu
minced by gunships

hundreds of thousands
of children starved
as the result of sanctions

these also had names
unrecorded on the walls
of the American heart

WATERMELON

the man at the stall
who had a big knife for slicing
told me Te Kauwhata
with perfect Polynesian pronunciation

where he had grown
and the names of the children
spitting pips at each other in the summer dust
he kept to himself

a local artist
painted the same red barn each year
to record its fading
his early works he said had not sold as well

under police lights circling recklessly
stones of a broken wall
lay moist and lurid
unusually tasteless fruit

REFUGEE STATUS

he has no photograph to show
of his homeland
and the pumps used
to channel slush
into the fields and ruin them

his family is a crop of graves
marked by stones
in diminishing sizes
with less carved grief each time
until the last and least adorned

THE NOVEL

letting thought go
with the loose end
of the ballpoint

late summer torchlight
in a sleeping bag
or half cut in some

flea bite hostel bunk
between dirt track labouring hires

something at first about
the dignity of toil
and the sort of whiskered faces

that peer out of Friday night
party snaps
not always impossibly young

talking to any stray bloke
to record his philosophy
or solitude

tough guy dialogue
street smart scat to set
or stop the world spinning

didn't we all have one
before we stopped looking
and started living it

paper smelling of candle wax
demo timber smoke
tears

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