The land doesn’t end
so much as intensify
into a final offering
of cliffs & rises & rocks.
Cape Reinga is where
waters cross waters
beyond a lighthouse.
An unsteady woman
on a marae was
coming to a conclusion:
‘I will lay here soon’.
And travel to the wide-open bay
where the mind clicks like a turnstile,
& the locals stand in the clothes
of ghosts & spirits.
Travel as you can up there
where the sky speaks to the sea
the way hands release a bird.
A rooster crowed – the villagers in their black dresses
and tata, their black suits, white white shirts,
the flower of their devotion.
A pig ambled in the rain.
Then they began to open their mouths
to listen and find one another,
they began to fill up the mystery,
to waken our souls.
This blending of human voices,
low and high and humming,
and lifting.
They sang themselves out of themselves.
They summoned their dead from under garlanded mounds,
the bright sails of their embroided names.
They sang them out of the depths of their ocean –
from their watery wrecks.
They sang for our brief moment here,
offered up this,
this shattering blue cathedral of song.
I wonder now I know your name
whether it was that far-away sound
always just beyond me,
why it sounds so right now.
It’s as if I heard it years ago,
and it kept me travelling.
I hear it now, and say it to myself,
as much in love as wonder.
I can hear your name
even when I have not said it.
I want and will it so
the first, the last, the only thing.
‘Afterwards we got drenching summer rain/a blackbird hopped out onto the backyard/all chest & pluck/we stayed inside/watched the rain slant the hills/I said it was a proper New Zealand summer/never all bloody sunshine/but blue & bloody the way a heart can be/that holiday we buried our dog with her head pointing toward the sea/I put my hand against my collarbone/while watching rain’
His young arm reached for plums
from the slow train.
Those low passing trees gave him a lifelong
taste for plums, and remembering plums.
We drove past a wooden building
with a strange name solitary on a hillside.
Caberfeidh, we’d heard our father say,
a place which once did exist.
We came to a station where bleached
summer grasses grew through a platform –
weather and fallen wood and birds,
the afternoon’s faint call of names -
the collapsing ticket office.
His grandfather collected him in a buggy.
They travelled up that empty road,
dust and horse sounds and trees.
That was what we saw the day
we went to see where our father
picked plums from that slow passing train.
-a poem about our father who travelled by train from Dunedin down to his grandparent’s farm in the Catlins, South Otago. We made the trip by car when we spread his ashes in 2007.
Reading the poem ’There’ on RNZ this aftn in Two Tone Record Shop Dunedin T-shirt. #poetryactionshot
What could we say mother
that wouldn’t cause shyness,
would allow you to be
the centre for a minute,
the centre of all you created,
What would we say mother
that wouldn’t cause you to say
we’re making claims, when
we know your heart is such
a quiet one. Can we just say
Mother, for our sake,
you were there, where only
you could be - all we want
to claim, mother, when there
was what sustained us.
Her grandmother gave her the last florin
