Hawks

my worst poems are ones
that I know best of all.
it comes, I suppose,
from revision – the ones that come back
with rejections from magazines
like swallows and geese
and electric bills. some poems never
get printed at all, and I read them
again and again and again –
it’s like buttering untoasted
slices of bread, tearing these pages
to pieces on sideboards. I’ve no judgement
on what’s good until someone says
that they’ll take it, but I love them
the same – I don’t really finish them –
even the ones I no longer believe,
or no longer believe will be published.
it’s why, ten years later,
I’m patching and changing
the violent romanticism
of a man in his earliest
cracked eggshell 20s,
who knows what love is,
and what life is. occasionally,
with some project or other
in mind, I print out old poems
and am often surprised
by the good ones which someone
must have taken. a hawk over fields,
over meadows at distance –
something you see
from a car on a journey,
which doesn’t much range
and return, though you do still
remember it. the floating, the motorway
siding of grey truck-thrown
dust. the moment
when wings fold
and claws fold.

I Miss You As Hubcaps

late evenings in april,
and now in the park
there are people all over
being out as night falls
on their own. around them
the herds of young deer
stand at some cautious
distance, in the manner of music
you hear through a window
when a car, passing, pauses
at a corner or traffic light
and allows you a moment to hear.
I am walking – I am thinking
of not very much. you’re away – I suppose
I’m of you. south there are mountains,
the river, the blue fade
of distance, and everywhere suburbs
which hunker down just
behind trees and brick
walls all directions.
a young woman sits typing
on a bench on a laptop.
a man is on skates, and a couple
are strapping their child to a pram.
there are dogs. there’s a few
groups of germans. I miss you as hubcaps
on roadsides miss wheels
at the site of some long-over accident.
as they sit and have grass
grow around them and through them,
and brambles and other things like that.

DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of the Net and seven times for the Pushcart Prize. He has released two collections, "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016) and "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019). His third collection, "Noble Rot" is available from Turas Press.