To be continued, perhaps
     Horace, Odes I, 11

It’s said that to know too much
displeases the gods, so for their sake, my love
stop asking for the end of our story:

no horoscopes, no animal entrails,
forget weather gurus in this time
of storms and climate disasters;

don’t think of the waves at their worst
smashing on the rocks at Karekare
but share with me a bottle of Te Mata red.

We’ll leave our grapevine and plum tree
to blackbird and thrush and other
untidy feeders, and to the wasps.

Let’s talk together not about flashy Love
but the brilliant books and poems it has inspired
and the ones who wrote them –
...