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.