Why She Quit Queen at Night

cos anywhere’s safer than sleepin shallow on queen street in
deep night never deep enuf tho to hide her from dem young
ones wit their shark skin suits and radar brows made for
catchin jumpy heart-beats and hers would let out an irregular
vibration like a wounded echo in a sinkhole leadin em direct
to her & lee (they been together 2 years since she were kickt
outta home out west and she aint never been back) and it’d
take jus one of dem young ones to land her one in the jaw
smash her teeth in top to bottom leavin a hole too big to
whistle thru too small to cry over but even then she still is
pretty as a petal for an old gal in her twenties lee says and
she’d laugh and show him her pretty bloody gums and go wit
a shrug n short memory to the hospital where they’d fix her
up proper cos they already knows her from last time the day
she lay dazed on the concrete next to lee wit her ear to the
pavement knowin she could hear the water of the waihorotiu
flowin to swellin under the sewer below in a direction only
she could calculate wit her inbuilt compass her north star
hearin it movin not stoppin magnetic all the way and as
long as it never stood still never stopped stagnant she knew
it would get to where it were goin cos she could hear it go
torrential and it sounded alive           and she understood that

Carin Smeaton
from Tales of the Waihorotiu (Titus Books, 2017)

Playing favourites: Why she quit Queen at night by Carin Smeaton

This poem is from Carin’s collection Tales of the Waihorotiu (Titus Books, 2017). It was selected by then NZ Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh for the anthology Best New Zealand Poems. I got to know it because I was doing the admin for the website at the time. At the reading for BNZP 2017, as part of the IIML’s Writers on Mondays series, I chose to read this poem. Every time I read it, in my head or out loud, it always brings tears to my eyes.

The image of the rough-sleeping woman listening to the Waihorotiu stream is a very poignant one. Before the city of Auckland was built, Queen Street was a gully with a stream running down it. Aotea Square was a swampy area. Now the Waihorotiu has been covered over and channelled into brick sewers, and the former swamp is a paved area, and the Aotea centre. I think of the woman in this poem and the stream as being kindred spirits who have both been subjugated by capitalism. Commerce is given priority over people and over nature. But, both woman and stream retain their inherent power. It is important to note that in Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori women are disproportionately affected by homelessness, with a report in 2024 finding that four out of five unhoused women are Māori. So there is a very significant layer in this text involving colonisation and structural inequities. I am always amazed by the potential of poetry to convey big, difficult and upsetting things within a small amount of words – Carin is a poet who is adept at this.

In 2011, artist Barry Lett (who died in 2017) proposed uncovering the stream and turning upper Queen Street into a garden. What an awesome idea! I hope we see more nature-focused urban design in the future, for ecological reasons but also for our own spiritual health.

Airini Beautrais

Barry Lett article
Homeless women report

Listen to Carin read the poem on Best NZ Poem 2017 page

Carin Smeaton lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with whānau. Her fourth collection, Age oƒ Orpah, will be published early next year. Orpah is the third part of an unholy trinity, accompanying Hibiscus Tart and Death Goddess Guide To Self Love into the infinite centre. All published by Titus Books and illustrated by her gifted Sydney based niece Kansas Smeaton. They’re fundraising for Orpah’s publication on Boosted if you want to check her out.

Airini Beautrais writes poetry, fiction and creative non fiction. Her most recent work is the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024). She lives in Whanganui.