Sugarloaf hill by Bill Sutton

I like to start my morning walks

earlier in late summer

before the Hawke�s Bay heat engine

gets going
and the flies start up.



There are people already

some with dogs...

we smile and exchange

handfuls of words.



Scratches in the dirt

like some post-modernist

literary text

signify a rabbit



and I see the ragwort

is making a comeback

from spraying and

Oh Dirty River by Helen Lehndorf

The town where I grew up


was small, ugly and smelledlike burning blood.



Most of the dads and


a lot of the mums andheaps of the big brothers and sisters

worked at the Freezing Works.



Thousands of cows and sheep


and even a few hundred pigs

would get trucked in, slaughtered,chopped up and packaged
in cling film each day.



The burning-blood smell

came from the incineratorwhere