Tuesday Poem: Missing Hat

                  for Harriet  26 8 93–7 5 14

Audacious to think I taste that kind of sorrow. My missing

of you is simply on our steps in Ghuznee Street: you in a shiny, 

red coat, wanting to know where to go to get a hook-and-eye 

 fixed on your dress, delighted to be 

taken up Cuba to the small shop that’s shut now, the one with 

the blackboard and the mysterious seamstress. I'd have done 

it for you if I’d had needle and thread, but instead I left you 

                                     by the blackboard – and we hugged 

and your coat squeaked, your skin up close impossibly creamy. 

I think too of watching you talk that day, when you gave time 

without weighing it, the tracings your fingers made, mouth

                         so mobile, your face a place people

lingered. The way you said to a wedge of brownie on a plate: 

‘Perfect!’ and regarded it with such plain affection. Small ruins 

for me. For the brother they call Gramps, the weeping father, 

                                     the stoic mother, Grandma Jo, the rest –

Mac in his kilt, girls in scarlet lippy and pineapple pants, boys 

with three-day beards and skinny ties – for them this missing 

is a shattered city: lost spires, gutted high-rises, lights stuck 

                                    on amber, paper caught in chicken-

wire, the howl as wind claws the perimeter fence. 

Mary McCallum

Hat and puppy.
Photo credit: Rebekah Dorman

Harriet Rowland would have been 21 today. The lively, gorgeous Wellington student passed away on 7 March this year.

We at Mākaro Press published the blogs she wrote over the nearly three years she lived with cancer – it's called The Book of Hat and it's been a surprise hit: on bestseller lists, bought by students and grandparents, by bookclubs and classrooms, and runner-up in the Ashton Wylie award between Lloyd Geering and Joy Cowley. 

So many people have responded to Harriet's vivid, upbeat and compassionate voice. It's been called 'the real The Fault in Our Stars' but it's more than that... there's something singularly Hattie about the book, that spills out in the reading, and doesn't leave you. Peter Jackson's called it, 'truthful, funny and wise'. All of that. Just – Hat. 

And now it's going global! The Book of Hat is an ebook -- launched today, something we've achieved working with Rosa Mira Books in Dunedin. And we're also off today on our third roadshow around Wellington secondary schools distributing Hat's book – donations from generous reader Bridget Percy, who reckoned every school should have a copy. 

All great ways to celebrate the wonderful woman Harriet Rowland was, on what would have been her 21st birthday. And goodness would she have partied! 

Do check out the Tuesday poem for a host of other poems.