Tag Archives: Poetry Shelf Breathing Room

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Claire Beynon

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Grapefruit

He has two wishes for his sixth
birthday: a pocket of ruby grapefruit
and a citrus knife
with a bend in it.

It is the Fast of Ramadhan — the twenty-eighth day
in — and the weather shows no consideration.
Flies and an irreverent heat
nudge Mr Sahlie the fruit seller
and his cart horse up the street.

The children are waiting. They know
he will come. He’ll spoil them
with a fistful of pomegranate, a slice of ice
green melon. Upside down they wait
dangling limbs and rinds of chatter
from the purple crown of a jacaranda
tree. They swing from a sandpit sky
scuffed toes bare, swishing through a thick mirage
of air. Up at the gate, in the post-box shade
beach buckets brim with the horse’s drink.

Ramadhan. And today is the boy’s
sixth birthday. He drops to the ground
with a ripe fruit sound, runs
pelter, pelter down the street.
There’s a horse, a cart and an old man
to meet.

And of course he’s remembered. He whistles
and grins, heaves the grapefruit down.
Next week, they agree, when the Fast
is complete, they’ll sit on the pavement
enjoy a pink feast.

“Why, Mr Sahlie?” I hear my boy speak.
“Why do they smell so wet
and deep?”

Claire Beynon
from Open Book: Poetry & Images, Steele Roberts, 2007

Claire Beynon is an artist and writer living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her poetry, flash fiction and short stories have been widely pub-lished and anthologised in Aotearoa and abroad. She has been a runner-up in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and in 2002 was the winner of the NZ Poetry Society’s International Poetry award. In 2021 her poem ‘Today’s Sky’ was awarded the Takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.  Claire combines the contemplative rhythms of writing and art-making with a range of interdisciplinary collaborations. Two summer research seasons in Antarctica continue to inform her work. Her most recent collection is For when words fail us: a small book of changes, The Cuba Press, 2024. Website

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: See What a Little Moonlight Can Do to You by Hone Tuwhare

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See What a Little Moonlight Can Do to You

The moon is a gondola.
It has stopped rocking.
Yes. It’s stopped now.

And to this high plateau
its stunning influence
on surge and loll of tides
within us should

somehow not go
unremarked
for want of breath
or oxygen.

And if I
to that magic micro-second
instant
involuntary arms reach out
to touch detain

then surely
it is because you
are so good:
so very good to me.

Hone Tuwhare
from Mihi: Collected Poems, Penguin Books, 1987

Hone Tuwhare (1922- 2008) was a father, poet, political activist and boilermaker. He published at least thirteen collections of poetry, won two New Zealand Book Awards, held two honorary doctorates and, in 1999, was Te Mata Poet Laureate. In 2003 he was named an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Artist.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy wonder stillness of a poem.

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Talia Marshall

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The first rope

S/he was wading in the river

buoyed by the intuition

there is only water between the sky

and the whenua and this wai

is how they talk to each other

afterwards they lit a fire

and fried leftover boiled potatoes in brown butter

using her kuia’s pan, when it was time for sleep

her hair was in the way of him

so she split it in three and

crossed one kelpy strand over the other

so he could take it apart over and over

in the morning he wears a top knot

where her braid used to be


Talia Marshall
from I hold you to me by a thread series on Substack

Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia, Rangitāne o Wairau, Ngāti Rārua, Ngāti Takihiku) is a Dunedin-based writer. She has had work published in Poetry magazine, Landfall, Sport, North & South, Mana, Canvas, The Spinoff, Newsroom, Pantograph Punch and with City Gallery. In 2020 she was the inaugural Emerging Māori Writer in Residence at the IIML at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, and in 2021 she won the Newsroom Surrey Hotel Writers Residency. Whaea Blue (2024) is her first book.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Magnetic South by Sue Wootton

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Magnetic South

You are my magnetic south.
I fall to you true.

I am the eel, the gull,
the silvery fish,
returning and returning.

Yours is the tide I swim to.

Sue Wootton
From Magnetic South, Steele Roberts, 2008

Sue Wootton’s most recent poetry collection is The Yield (Otago University Press, 2017), which was a finalist in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand book awards. She has held the Robert Burns Fellowship, the NZSA Beatson Fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. In 2025 she was awarded the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, for a suite of sonnets called ‘Holding Patterns: Seven songs of pots, jars, bowls and vases’. Sue lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, and is the publisher at Otago University Press. The poem ‘Magnetic South’ is from her 2008 collection of the same name, published by Steele Roberts.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy wonder stillness of a poem.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A Life by Kiri Piahana-Wong

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A Life

The late afternoon
finds you seeking
clarity in a book
of Rilke poems, a
shortbread biscuit,
and a cup of lemon
tea—with a dash
of honey.

The honey swirls
down through the
tea, and biscuit
crumbs fall into
the book, lodging
in the spine. The
fading sun slants
across the page.

Today, you decide,
you are truly content
to call your life a
great song. Or even
a small song.
A lullaby. Something
to sing your child to
sleep.

Kiri Piahana-Wong
from night swimming, Anahera Press, 2013


Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet, editor and publisher living in Tāmaki Makaurau.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy wonder stillness of a poem.

The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room

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my poetry cup by Rebecca Jean Harris

Last year Poetry Shelf dedicated a number of posts to protest poems. Especially Gaza. Especially the preservation of Thomson Gorge in Central Otago. These days my news feeds are flooded with issues I want to challenge, to speak out against. Choices, for example, our current government is making, whether in health, education, land care, flora and fauna care, water care, the homeless, the hungry, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, speaking te reo Māori, diverse cultures, racism, sexism, genderism, the Arts, then Sciences, and so much more. Or whether it’s the heartbreaking toll on human lives, homes, communities in the Middle East where men, women and children are bargain chips. And where some people, especially aid workers, are working against all odds to heal and mend rather than destroy and barter.

What matters?

What matters to us when each day is a patchwork of light and dark, hope and despair. When helplessness can be a contagion with both personal and global infusions.

Poetry Shelf will continue to protest and speak out in the form and voice of poems.

But I am now offering you The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room. Each week I invite you to enter a poem as breathing space, a slender moment to recharge, a solace device. A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy wonder stillness of a poem.

The poem becomes a temporary breathing room. A miniature act of self care. Art can do this. A painting or photograph or sculpture can do this. Music can do this. Music can most definitely do this. I am mindful that we would all select different poems to stand in for the breathing room, but over the coming months, I invite you to enter the room and recharge your mind and heart.

Just for a slender exquisite gentle meditative moment.