A poem for Poetry Day

Today is POETRY DAY in New Zealand, and there is a feast of poetry to be had up and down the country.

Every day was poetry day for Janet Frame. Here is one of her poems:

The Place

The place where the floured hens
sat laying their breakfast eggs,
frying their bacon-coloured combs in the sun
is gone.

You know the place -
in the hawthorn hedge
by the wattle tree
by the railway line.

I do not remember these things
- they remember me,
not as child or woman but as their last excuse
to stay, not wholly to die.

(From The Pocket Mirror, 1967)