It is wet and cold.
Your birthday June mist

hovers over us like a still grey blanket.
Mud stays on our gumboots

long after we leave you Mum
behind at the urupā, alone. Auē!

Staring from the bedroom door
at your empty peggy-square bed

we’re silent now too
forever hushed, desolate.

In the still of the paua black night
	ngā wāhine karakia ki ngā whetū o Matariki 
from the hilltop looking out to the mist beyond 
	aching voices soft-scoop us up with their embrace
Auē, at last, a consoling salve
	long suffocacted by barbed wire saying no.

Bracing winds of Ururangi uplift the throats of ngā kaikarakia
	releasing fire from our collective memories
burning bright before Pōhutukawa, he mihi ki a koe, he Rangatira
	no tears though fall before these embers
consumed with guilt and remorse, whacked with trauma by the dead
	a hand-me-down dish-cloth by the years.