for love
when my aunty
heard the news
her grandson
her ‘boy’
she’d say
killed head-on
just starting
to fit the frame
of a grown man
she stopped
dead in her tracks
two weeks on.
she had lived
though years
of rationing,
long silences
out on the farm
moving to a
small town
with a park on
the edge of a
pine forest the
state highway
tore by
everything a
marriage did
and didn’t bring
could take it all
yet couldn’t
take this.
she died
outright
for love.
september 2011
Ruru ki Te Ruru 