Moonlight
       Kate Gray (1975–1991)

I start up a conversation
with occasional Kate. Too late,
too late, but with a big sigh
she appears in the sky.

I tell her the home doesn’t forget –
her mother’s lullaby step
still reaches the chair
where her father sits deep in the forest.

I hear myself saying
please and please and please;
I want to go back
to the start of the nineties.

Sleepless night, big almond eyes,
and a hand rocks a pram in the passage;
from somewhere a long way
outside of our houses

the moon sends its light to this page.

Bill Manhire
from My Sunshine, VUP, 1996

Poetry Shelf is hosting another festival season of Playing Favourites. Poets have selected a poem of their own that they love, usually previously published. Bill Manhire’s choice struck multiple chords with me, and is the perfect poetry to be reading when I crave the boost of lingering with a poem, with its connections, surprise and wonder delight. Maybe you will love the last line as much as I do and then find yourself drifting back to the first line. Paula Green

Bill Manhire’s latest poetry collection is Lyrical Ballads, THWUP, 2026. He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, and was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate. He founded and directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies of New Zealand literature, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984). In 2018 Bill was awarded an Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga from the Arts Foundation.