My recent book, Slender Volumes, is made of 300 seven-line poems. Really they are 300 stories, told in different modes: the realistic, the autobiographical, the historical and the surreal. One, popular with audiences when read aloud, is number 216, which concerns Mr Moth and his dairy:

There was a dairy at the end of the road owned by Mr Moth. Everybody knew it as Moth’s dairy. He sold ice blocks made in a special mould – the stem being a popsicle with a large wing on each side. The ice blocks came in different colours and were named Emerald Surprise, Ruby Splendour and, best of all, the Tiger Moth. The dairy always shut its door at dusk. No fluorescent lights were switched on. Mr Moth liked the darkness.

What seems to be a figment of my imagination, in the surreal mode, in fact came from a walk around Onehunga Bay Lagoon. On this particular walk my wife Amala and I encountered an old-time resident who told us that many years ago there used to be a dairy opposite our house on Normans Hill Road. The dairy was owned by a Mr Moss. I misheard him, and thought he said “Mr Moth”. This led to a reverie about Mr Moth and his dairy, which I wrote down when I got home.

Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer. He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. His recent works are the acclaimed memoir, This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press, 2016), Postcard Stories (Titus Books, 2019), and Resonating Distances (Titus Books, 2022).

In 2020 he was the University of Waikato’s writer-in-residence. His book Walking with Rocks, Dreaming with Rivers: My Year in the Waikato (Titus Books, 2023) was written during his residency.

In 2025 his new collection of poetry, Slender Volumes (Spoor Books, 2024), was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards.