Tui Bevin

Dunedin, New Zealand

Tui is a retired medical researcher who  enjoys the freedom of writing memoir and poetry. She has been placed in poetry competitions and published in Tui Motu, the Otago Daily Times, Poems in the Waiting Room, corpus.nz and the New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology 2019.

This poem was written on 15 April 2020.

Living Over

I was there and hugged the mother-to-be 

when only I could tell she was pregnant…

I was there and hugged the mother-to-be

when her boy child whooshed into the world…

I was there and hugged the boy child

when he cried and needed settling in his grandmother’s arms…

I was there and hugged the boy child

when he was baptised James Henrik…

I was there and hugged James Henrik

when we celebrated his first birthday, and his second…

I was there and hugged James Henrik

when he went to ED with croup at midnight…

I was there and hugged James Henrik

when we celebrated his third birthday…

I was there but couldn’t hug James Henrik

when he opened his fourth birthday presents

sitting over two metres away,  on the driveway, 

in the cold, behind the locked gate.

I will be there when lockdown is over

I will open the gate, and

I will hug James Henrik again, and again.