Holding Hands
While we're sitting here waiting,
let's hold hands.
I feel yours with contentment.
I remember us smelling
fragrant roses,
freshly mown
hay in our hair.
I remember slipping our palms
Into a cool stream at dawn, under
an avenue of punga fronds
while korimako sings above our heads.
I’m going to use my hands to plant you,
as tenderly as you did me, into this
native soil because it is your turn
to be reminded that you are
where you need to be.
So I hold you hand.
Your hand, the one that taught
my hand dirt, seeds and seasons.
Our hands, waiting together.
Packing Treasures
One by one;
antique,
heirloom,
ornament
icon,
all pretty pieces
collected by you.
I hold
each one,
wrapping to
remember
as my father
moves on.
But you
I could
not touch,
not like this,
and you were
not pretty
at the end
into the last box.
Listen To Me
On my right
I have the right to trmain silent.
Through rage I will, but not at you
or to you since you can't hear me.
especially through tears
and they always come,
as hard as I try to remain upright,
water tight, salt seeps through
and betrays my wound.
On my left, I am left out.
You wanted a boy didn't you?
If I didn't look like you
(they all say so, so like your mother),
I would swear I was swapped.
My real mother kisses me,
calls me her angel. Come on, let me
be your angel, lay your head
on my shoulder, accepting.
From somewhere in the centre,
I will make a bridge from earth to air,
for your soul to cross as you die
and die you will. You cannot fight it.
I will do my best to bring the sacred
green-blue wild quiet of my sailing life
into yout fenced-in stiff upper lip pain place.
For I am taught
by freshly dewed leaves
spinning in a carressing breeze
that nothing holds on.
Nature will claim us,
release you from
having to be
right
strong
martyr
and even you, my mother,
will have to surrender.
Kristina Jensen is a 'poet afloat', freelance writer and musician living a life of voluntary simplicity on a boat in the Marlborough Sounds of New Zealand with her artist husband and home-schooled son. Wild food foraging, sailing and watching the sun rise are her favourite past-times and she looks forward with interest to the ‘drying up’ of oil and subsequent economic and social mayhem that will follow in the hope that people will be more inclined to read poetry and relax. Her poetry has been published in Bravado, Valley Micropress, Eclecticism, REM, Shotglass, Cyclamens & Swords, Granny Smith, Takahe, A Fine Line and by Forward Poetry..