Complaint

Haven’t all of us ruined something?

Isn’t everything terrible?

Isn’t hope fleeting and utterly futile,

like trying to take

a photograph of the moon

with a cheap phone?

There was potential but you missed it.

There was connection but you blinked.

There was a lesson

but you spent it carving a dick into the desk. 

Jane Arthur lives in Pōneke, where she is manager and co-owner of a small bookshop. Her first poetry collection, Craven, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press (then VUP) in 2019 and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.