i wonder if my mokopuna
will know how much i hated
my hairy chest and
roman nose
i wonder if they will remember
how when I was 12
i plucked off the whiskers
above my upper lip
till the skin bled
i wonder if they will know all the times
i looked up my iwi
cause i didn’t know how to spell it
i wonder if they will know
how i never felt Māori enough
how i never felt quite
anything
enough
i wonder if
when i am dust in the dirt
or in an urn on their mantle
they will feel
everything
i
felt
i wonder if they will think me an ancestor
or
just some broken words from an archived website
or
a few pixels in a cracked phone screen
made up of
red and green and blue
light
Featured photo by Ben Girven.
