Transparent eyeball
It is easy to pretend to be everything.
A mother picks up a stack of bricks to mend her wall,
a child runs through sprinklers,
a bird flies too high and breaks its wing,
blood and feathers and hollow bones.
The heart of a hummingbird
locked in a box.
Did you hear?
The hummingbird has the biggest heart.
2.5% of its weight.
Surely a human heart is similar?
Google and the growing number of tabs
suggest otherwise.
Weird that a hummingbird
has a bigger capacity to love,
but not weird at the same time.
Humans are assholes.
A tree falls and keeps growing.
A house crumbles under the weight of thunder.
A secret longs to be held,
and your eyes roll over themselves
like plastic in a child’s ball pit.
Life is the shadow of death
that can only be seen in starlight,
and when Joy sleeps,
it dreams of Despair.
A shopping cart is exposed at low tide,
rusting and lonely with its two back wheels
reaching for the sky.
It was submerged when I last walked past.
Sunlight dancing across dull metal
and making it look like something magical
rather than something forgotten.
I took a picture.
Sometimes I just want to be held
like a lover on the battlefield.
A sword through my chest and
my blood spilling over the floor
and her
like cheap wine.
It would be nice to be
held with no consequences,
with no second guesses about tomorrow
because there are none left.
Truth deceives us more often than death.
Has the grim reaper ever lied to you?
Or Hades, with his helm of shadows?
Instead fear Aletheia, for the truth
lies in her hands.
I think the shadow behind me is growing.
You are transparent.
Or translucent?
No matter,
for you are not here
and you are not you
and I am an afterthought.
Seeing all and being nothing.
Natalya Newman
Year 13
Huanui College
