Song

I was licking the moon like
a streetlamp before the water
razed the city — people, jobs,
lovers, I feel your movements
glowing and reckoning with me.
Some people say the loss I felt

with you was inevitable, a foregone
conclusion, but I can still breathe
the air around the dark
shape of your body.

The life I’ve felt has been
larger only than this tide;
tonight, messages from family reach
me, surreal, on my phone.

My cousins in Beirut can feel
the terror in the air, I go on
with so little left to speak; listen
to my heart, these songs
of loss I write while I
cannot hear the bombs.

Jackson McCarthy

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he currently serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work here.