The Friday Poem: How to Be Happy Though Human by Kate Camp
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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.
Kate Camp
Kate Camp is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently How To Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected poems published by Victoria University Press in New Zealand and House of Anansi Press in Canada. Her memoir, You Probably Think This Song Is About You, will be published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in July 2022.
