The last poem

Life gives me wishes. 

I tuck them under the lemons

in a fruit bowl that isn’t a fruit bowl.

Every vessel is versatile, after all.

Both whole & empty. Both host & guest.

Holds the present as much as it 

holds a whisper of the future. 

I save my wishes like a child 

afraid of ruining a brand-new art set. 

Watercolours untouched for decades. 

So many rainy days spent in boredom. 

But of all the wishes rotting under lemons 

the one I want to use the most is

to see him in every room I walk into 

from now until our last night’s last poem. 

These days I wish for love more than ever,

now that I’m attuned to its give & take.

On an in-between night in Amsterdam 

I stand on a bridge & watch the water turn 

from passage to mirror & back again. 

I’ve seen water change like this before 

when it was too tired to continue carrying 

the wishes of a broken world. Too clear 

to protect us from what happens 

at the end of joy. It’s summer & 

I’m rewiring myself in this new city—

one that doesn’t judge 

what you wish for selfishly. Desire 

will be granted in return for patience.

Outside my apartment a man dismantles 

a piano soaked by overnight rain. 

The wires shriek & the instrument’s cavity

frees its final notes. The city moans along. 

Keys & little hammers piled up 

on the pavement like abandoned poems. 

So many ends & new tides lately 

it’s got me turning to water 

for direction. Something to wild the urge

to be settled for this version of now.

Life is good when you let yourself be taken 

by new joys that don’t yet have a name.

Here, over a canal, I weep. Life is good.

Chris Tse is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press, and co-editor of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. He was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2022-25.