Moon

Maya’s gazpacho turned out grey —
my new maroon shirt had stolen
all the red in the house.

I wore that shirt daily
like a rare bird or fish
wears its rarity. Soon I saw you,

first by fingers, then the shapes
of your hands perfecting moon.
You were standing red

in the middle of the street,
the rarest thing I ever saw — the truck
had swerved to kiss you.

Wairua, I should kiss you too — twice, once
or each direction you’re facing.

Jackson McCarthy
from Portrait (Auckland University Press, 2026)

Oh, I love the colour blue, but I wanted to bring some red into the poetry, especially toward the end of my book, which is where this poem appears. I think the lightly surreal touch has a Maia Armistead quality about it, and I’m quite pleased with how the lines break and turn over the thoughts they think. It’s all quietly surprising, as most things in the night are. Kissing appears lots in my poetry as it does in my life. It’s just such a great thing to do, nothing psychological about it. Like, I don’t think kissing expresses a desire to consume or to master the beloved or whatever. Kissing expresses its own duration, so as to draw itself nearer and nearer to somebody else’s mystery, which I think is very beautiful and in some sense quite like poetry. And as for the facing in two directions, there in the last two lines — I hope it has resonance with another night scene from earlier in the book, “Night train”. In that poem, one way is the past, and the other way (the future, extrapolated to its extreme) is death.

Not sure what it all means, but my preoccupation is with nothing less than love, death, and time, of course. Where are you headed and where have you been? And what should we do with the present? “Moon” was first published in my book Portrait; thank you to my publisher, Auckland University Press.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He is of Lebanese, Māori, and Pākehā descent. His poetry has been published widely in Aotearoa literary journals, including Landfall Tauraka, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, The Spinoff, Starling, and Sweet Mammalian. Portrait (Auckland University Press, 2026) is his first book.