You Must Allow Me to Tell You

Taken aback by her daring disregard
of social conventions about stopping distance,
the cyclist laughed, refrained
from giving a lecture on manners
to the young woman with puffed sleeves
who stepped onto the crossing
reading a book the old-fashioned way
like she’d stepped from a Jane Austen novel
determined to make it clear
she was more interested in reading
than life itself, and nothing and no-one
would make her look up
so she could see, as I did, someone riding
as if spurred on by signal-light
to a stile beside a field inlaid with daffodils,
where love waits in the shade of an elm,
heart and initials carved last week.

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Brett Reid lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He has previously been published in Landfall, New Zealand Listener, and Sentinel Literary Quarterly.