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Claire Orchard
© Ebony Lamb
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the poet
A Pākehā poet from Aotearoa New Zealand, Claire Orchard is the author of Liveability and Cold Water Cure. She's had poetry published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Turbine | Kapohau, Sweet Mammalian, NZ Poetry Shelf and 4th Floor Journal. Claire's work was also selected for Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems in both 2014 and 2016. A Hawthornden Fellowship recipient in 2016, she holds an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and was a poetry columnist for Capital Magazine between 2015 and 2021.
the poems
After one storm,
before the next
Packing sandbags, hand over hand,
against the crumbling bank. Some days
it all dribbles away, although
they say the human brain
retains everything somewhere or other,
if I only knew exactly where
my subconscious laid it down
and the noise rain makes on a corrugated iron roof
when heard from beneath the covers of a warm bed
is still the best sound in the world.
Opening drawers, things overflow,
and where to start? Chickens come home
to roost but what of these mental bantams,
flapping about? Sometimes, moving in the shiny
eye of it, I’ll catch sight of your photograph
and I’d swear you’re just some model
I’ve never met, posing with a full wine glass
in an interior design magazine.
When I bring up
advance care planning
Mum says oh yes, I keep changing my mind
about whether or not I want to be cremated
and I say Mum, once you’re gone you won’t care
and we’ll just do whatever we want.
I’m not talking about after you’re dead,
I’m talking about when you’re still alive,
about what you want us to do if you can’t
speak for yourself, if you’re unconscious
or can’t understand what’s going on anymore.
Oh, she says. Well, I don’t want to be put in a home,
that’s for sure. Unless there’s no other option.
So, if the only other option is being dead,
you’d rather a home? Yes, I think so.
I really don’t want to be in a home
but I suppose if it’s that or being dead
then I’ll have to consider it.
Mum, I’m talking here about when
you won’t be able to consider it.
Like, do you want to be kept alive
if there’s a good chance you won’t wake up,
and if you do, you’ll not be able to wipe your own bum
or feed yourself? What if you can’t recognise people,
if you can no longer hold a conversation?
What if you have a massive stroke, and then
you stop breathing, would you want CPR?
Do you want artificial ventilation if you can’t
breathe on your own? These are the sorts of things,
the kinds of scenarios you need to consider
and then tell us what you want us to do.
I suppose so, she says doubtfully.
Where duty lies
It seems my great-grandmother
and my grandmother did not get on,
even though (or perhaps in part
because) one fell in love with
and married the other’s son.
Yet, when the time came,
the younger passed on to me
the elder’s Sunday School award
she’d kept safe through six weeks
sea voyaging and forty-odd years
up and down the country on trains.
A novel by Silas K. Hocking,
gilt embossed, illustrated, awarded
in 1899 as first prize to nine-year-old
Annie Entwhistle of Albert Road
Congregational Sunday School
for punctual attendance
and good behaviour. And indeed
what more could be asked or expected?
Publishing credits
After one storm, before the next: Sport (No. 46)
When I bring up advance care planning: Mayhem (Issue No. 9)
Where duty lies: Liveability (Te Herenga Waka University Press)