Dear Huma, 

You know, don't you, that if you and Bette Middler starred in something now it'd only get called Biatches? Don't blame you but don't think I ever loved you. The number of times you resigned to be replaced by three full-timers. 

 The mine’s blue eye emptied twenty years ago. We stayed. We married. We climbed into the cabs of our separate machines, & in the black sand socket began to dig. The steam – it looks like steam, peeling off a black cup – is dryer than smoke. We watch it all day. For breaks Jasmine rolls the darts and rattles her lungs at me. My lungs rattle back.  There’s no one else.

The thirtieth of twenty-nine empty dorms is ours. We use the seventh of six closed docks. The thirteenth of twelve sunk barges takes our work. 

When the managers left we unbolted a canteen table, and ever since we’ve eaten where we like. Last month I pierced, at last, the sea-side wall of the open pit. And now we see the ocean while we work. 

what can I do for my sisters? schedule in an honest conversation, like holiday poetry, or take it when the toddler's driving the van & we're hanging either side of the open door - tent flaps - tap runs - our annual ten minutes - hey I love you I don't want him to punch you - beep beep we're here! now everybody get on board! 

The video opens on a living room where two black women in black and white uniforms, with white aprons and caps, hold the arms of a naked white woman, labouring. The living room is spacious, with large garden windows and a settee in the centre. The carpet is covered, wall to wall, with newspaper. A white man in brown trousers and cardigan stands nearby. When the baby emerges the video ends. We drink chrysanthemum tea from waxed paper boxes. On the bus shelter outside is a single scrawled graffito: "Singapore good." You must be careful, says Matron, not to listen to your mother-in-law. If she tells you must not shower, must not use aircon, must not open the window. You must. She can tell us about infected breasts, the smell. Meat left in the car. Infected stitches under unchanged dressings. Babies thrown from apartment windows. Fate. A baby born without a skull. Fate already before you open your eyes. They come from China, and that is why. Now we have exercises. I feel pale. Purva leans against the wall instead of her husband, who is not here. Some part of the demonstration does not apply.

I need to come back to Huma. It's not that I blame her, but that I could not feel 

One day when I was nine or ten I went for a walk with my granddad on Patea Beach, and as we came around the head he saw the face of the cliff fall away from the cliff to stand, upright, beside it. I didn't see it but he was shaking, weird to me, and there was the broken cliff.

This morning I missed my bus and walked alone for the first time in ages, relieved by April wind on my eyes which I strained reading comments in the dark as my son went off to sleep. Someone was explaining that as we do not know our great great grandparents, nor our great great grandchildren, there's no real reason to care what happens in a hundred years' time. And there's a certain lightness to imagining that - the freedom of the unloved, dumbness going on like a bell already rung. 

Greenglass as a surname