Sunday morning

a poem by Harley Bell

We spend the morning in bed,
hair pressed to the pillows,
still blinking out of dreams.
Our first words plucked and mumbled.

Our bed is a mattress on pallets.
The sheets came untucked in the night.
I am curled against the wall.

You are rumbling. One of us wakes first and spills a limb across a body.

I clasp at the last remnants of a kingdom.
I dreamt in fragments; wild creatures with fluffy ears
and flowers inside a house.
I remember feeling warm.

There is no dirt here; no room inside our apartment.
All our corners and shelves already have purpose;
we have filled them with books.

We adore the light that spills across a Sunday morning.
There is every possibility that gardens can be grown
in the places we forget to look.
There is every possibility that spiders
are waiting to be fed beneath
our bed. There is every possibility
we will befriend them too.

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This poem is in my as yet unpublished poetry book, Wild Altar. I am currently searching for a publisher for it, do you have any suggestions where my work could find a home?

Wild Altar is a book of New Zealand poetry. It contains poems about art, love, meditation and magic. There are poems about sleeping in carparks, getting lost in forests and sailing between islands. There are hard moments when I pry under the rug, where we New Zealander’s love to sweep our darkness. All encircles the landscape of Aotearoa. All illumes what it is like to live here.