World Poetry Day 2017

Victoria International Institute of Modern Letters senior lecturer and acclaimed poet Chris Price shares one of her favourite New Zealand poems for World Poetry Day 2017.

1YA by Sonja Yelich, from Clung (Auckland University Press, 2004)

you get the radio on
& hear the bird of the day
which sounds like any other
whistle being fed into the 9
o'clock beeps with news

you know wellington is there somewhere
forming some sort of front.

there is a red light on the transistor
you got from the dick smith store

you are connected
by a tuner 

from the volume you will come to know
all those people going about
their step  up  up
into their warm lives
to stay put from the wind
which is for sure a hurtler.

you will come to believe
that wellington lies inside a radio
& bleak is on a m 

there will be much talk about
who the weather is heading for
& how wellington is forgot
of the sun. 

& you will remember vic's uncle pat
of petone
& the smell of his hands
in the wet flatette
& how his loose phlegm cough 
broke free of itself
on the carpet by your feet 

you can turn wellington
off with your thumb.