Another Beautiful Day Indoors

The light lengthens on the carpet,
a sure symptom of afternoon.
I haven’t left the house today
because there’s only one reason
to do that, and I’ve already got goat cheese.
A half moon is only a quarter of the moon.
This sky should win trophies.
I look at other people, their energy,
and think they must have been raised by marmots.
I know for the sake of social cohesion
we must try to live togetherly,
like Bronze Age women and men,
but it’s been a long week, and, anyway,
petrol prices have gone up again.

Erik Kennedy

I love Erik Kennedy’s 2022 collection Another Beautiful Day Indoors. It’s a banger – witty and bleak, smart and uplifting. I have been reading and re-reading it the last few months. You should read it too.

Anyway here is the title poem (one of my faves), and the response I was inspired to write which itself turned into a poem:

Rank Outsider
after Erik Kennedy’s ‘Another Beautiful Day Indoors’

I haven’t left the house today yet
someone asked me why I’m so good
at jigsaws and I said I really love a puzzle
but really poems remain a mystery
although this one held a mirror and
really it’s just an immune response
and I already have my clot of blue vein
though really the moon is running late and
the marmots are all deeply asleep and really
everyone is better at a distance but I tell them
really it’s because petrol is still too expensive
so here I am alone indoors, a sure symptom
of a beautiful day

Melinda Szymanik

Melinda Szymanik is a Tāmaki Makaurau based writer of children’s fiction, including picture books, short stories and novels, some of which have won awards. Occasionally her work turns out to be a poem and she has learned not to fight this as they can be dirty brawlers. Her adult poems have appeared in Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, NZ Poetry Shelf, takahē and Roi Fainéant Press.

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime(2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He is the poetry editor of takahē and an adjunct fellow in English at the University of Canterbury. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.