finding the luck
I stare at the ground
searching through the clovers
nestled in the overgrown grass
do you remember
looking for four-leaf clovers
when you were a kid?
I ask
yeah
you answer
why don't we do that anymore?
I ask
we know better now
you answer
silence
we know that there is no magic
you say
but there has to be
I answer
I stare at the ground
First published in a fine line, NZ Poetry Society journal - Featured Poet (2014)
About Paula
Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. She was the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center writing residency in 2018.
Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Passages North, Barren, New Ohio Review, SWWIM, Gulf Coast, The Spinoff, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and Aotearotica. Her essays have been published in The Sun, Passages North, The Spinoff and Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (Victoria University Press).
She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric.