The Tuesday Poem

The Tuesday Poem this week is "How They Came To Privatise The Night" by Maria McMillan.

Maria McMillan is a Kapiti-based writer who was born and bred in a Christchurch house full of books and with a view of the mountains. She is the author of the poetry sequence The Rope Walk (Seraph Press, 2013) and Tree Space (Victoria University Press, 2014). 
More poems and Maria's blog can be found at http://mariamcmillan.weebly.com/

This week's editor is Tim Jones, whose own recent books include poetry collection Men Briefly Explained (IP, 2011) and short story collection, Transported (Random House, 2008).

Maria McMillan says of her poem:

"I wrote this poem in the thick of researching, writing about and campaigning about water privatisation. It horrifies me that water, the source of all life, and a human necessity has become a focus for neo-liberalist attention. It no more belongs in the marketplace than night does. The language in the poem is lifted almost directly from the language used by those promoting the commodification of residential water in New Zealand."