Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two Nov-Dec 2026.
What happened to the monkeys?, poem by Jack Ross.
What happened to the monkeys?
That was the only question around our house this morning
we’d been watching a film called The Raftsmen the night before
about 12 guys on balsa rafts who sailed
from Ecuador across the Pacific to Australia
facing doldrums and mountainous seas sharks
typhoons and every other conceivable peril
all in the interests of the brotherhood of man but
what happened to the monkeys?
they started off with two of them free gifts from the crowd
as they were setting out along with a parcel of kittens
the kittens were great they served as weather gauges
they’d get quite agitated when a storm was coming
and wouldn’t settle down till it was past
those monkeys though they did get up to mischief
climbed up the masts and pissed on the crew
watched the men tying knots and then
untied them later
once in the middle of a storm
they fought with the kittens
even tossed one of them into the sea
it swam back to the raft
with a smile on its furry face
then after the great five-day blow
when one of the rafts was lost to sight for ages
no monkeys no kittens in any of the shots
d’you think they threw them overboard?
I asked
I bet they did said Bronwyn
how cruel! poor monkeys
they never should have brought them
towards the end there was just one snap
of a kitten sleeping blissfully in the midst
of all the wreckage on deck
but so it goes
eventually they got there
all of them careful never to utter the words
Thor Heyerdahl or Kon-Tiki
no mention either that this was the third such
expedition Captain Vital Alsar
had undertaken
the first time he sank in the middle of the ocean
the second time he managed to get to Australia
third time round he wanted to show
you could do it with three rafts together
as I hunted through websites
blah blah great feat great navigator
greater than Columbus finally
at the end of one of them I came across the truth
one of the monkeys
got caught in between two bins during a storm and got crushed
the other one
got an infection and we didn’t really know how to fix it
the three kittens survived
I doubt they even noticed
as they strolled off the boat in Queensland
and scarfed down treats
© Jack Ross
Jack Ross is the author of four novels, five books of short fiction, and seven poetry collections, most recently Tesseract (2026). He was the managing editor of Poetry New Zealand (now Poetry Aotearoa) from 2014-2020, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He retired from his job teaching creative writing at Massey University in 2022, and lives with his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, in an old Art Deco house in Auckland, New Zealand. He blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.