A new poem by Kate Camp.

How to Be Happy Though Human

From the Circle there was a man we couldn’t see just his fingers held out for emphasis
like the hands of a preacher or a primary school teacher. 

Before that we had been at the film where three people taxidermied a baby zebra
caught in the moment of standing for the first time. 

I go back to the wings of the stage of my school’s assembly hall. Smell of dust and
afternoons. We are hiding from folk dancing, which we love. 

And I go back to Saturday we dance with other people other people’s
children, create community with physics. 

Memory is a kind of mourning. We take each other’s hands as if they
were made for that and we form a circle. 

Taken from How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (Victoria University Press, 2020).

Submissions to the Friday Poem are welcome and will be open until the end of September. Please send your poems to chris@christse.co.nz.