Siobhan Harvey – Stargazer

Harvey LE P&W 3 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three November-December 2024

Aotearoa Poets and Writers Special Edition

Stargazer, poems by Siobhan Harvey.


Stargazer

Looking back, perhaps I did see things
in you that weren’t truly there, dedicated
myself to your observance above all
others. Perhaps it was the lure of the dark
pelt about you, animal, instinctual. Either
way, I was tricked by something beyond
me, something magnetic in its appeal.

But you didn’t take long to turn me
cold. Lover who showered rosebuds
upon me, all thorns and ice. Lover
who drew a deep soak for me,
all still and chill. So, no wonder
I went in search of companionship
elsewhere, found a hot body oozing warmth.


Stars The Body Knows

The night in us is strong.
It spins us into stories
passed down our descent,
orator to orator, author to author,
ancestral audiences hanging upon
our silvery words, as if we compose
a family history, a navigation in
memoir that outlasts the death
of its individual parts. Sometimes,
when we reflect upon this,
we who carry such legends
in our bones like stardust,
we realize the infinite heavens
aren’t possessed by things unknown
to us, like ghosts, but inhabited by
a collective understanding of
who, what and why we are
written in darkness and light.


© Siobhan Harvey

Siobhan Harvey is an author of eight books, including Landfall Kathleen Grattan Award winner, Cloudboy (Otago University Press, 2014) and, as co-editor, the New Zealand bestseller, Essential New Zealand Poems (Penguin Random House, 2014). She was runner up in 2024 Bridport Memoir Award (UK) and won the 2023 Landfall Essay Prize, 2020 NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship, 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems, 2019 UNESCO City of Literature Robert Burns Poetry Prize and 2016 US Write Well Award. Additionally, she has been runner up 3 times in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, 3 times selected for inclusion in Best New Zealand Poems, runner up, third and highly commended for the Landfall Essay Prize, and long-listed for Australian Book Review Peter Porter Prize and New Zealand Book Awards. In 2021 she was awarded the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry.

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