Long White Cloud

If my home pasture’s so much greener 
why leap all this barbed wire to graze 
in yours? The aeroplane over the moon 
unsure whether its metals ever yearned 

to mimic a bird or burning cross. I should not want 
to be a corn-fed house-cow kept for butter 
any more than I would like my children 
to become Americans. Everywhere I go: a colony 

drunk off curdling milk and honey. At a conference,
another poet tells me they dream of digging a bunker 
in my distant Erewhon. Not knowing the soil 
was already sold under all our feet, to feudal lords 

with fetishes for fresher dairy. Billionaire’s veins 
plump with young bulls’ blood. But still I love 
the bell about my neck, the foreignness that fills
my mouth repeatedly like cud as I low sweetly 

of that place over the waves. See it there, 
mantled in thunderheads? Come, hopefuls, 
let us now turn up our mouths, and wait 
to catch the promised rain of cream.

Rebecca Hawkes

I wrote this while living in the USA, after an awkward encounter with a famous poet I still very much admire. While navigating visa difficulties to stay in the States as I completed my studies, and at the same time desperately homesick for Aotearoa, well-meaning liberal Americans’ romantic ideas of our country as a shining green escape pod from the turmoil of their world superpower itched a bit. We’re a real place, actually, I wanted to say, with real troubles of our own – and already inhabited by powerful interests with close ties to American issues. So, this is my “we have Peter Thiel at home” poem, thinking about the hypocrisies of my own colony-hopping and inescapable longing for home, even as I push back on assumptions of easy sanctuary. Rebecca

Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet from a farm near Methven. Her first book was Meat Lovers (AUP). She edits NZ poetry journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the Pacific climate-poetics anthology No Other Place to Stand. Rebecca recently completed an MFA in yearning at the University of Michigan in the US, where her new work has found homes in places like Palette Poetry and Sixth Finch. Her  next full-length collection will be published by Yes Yes Books and Auckland University Press in 2026.