Interactive Press
Tongues of Ash
Westwater began writing poetry in 2003 while attending the International Institute of Modern Letters’ Writing the Landscape course at Victoria University of Wellington. Since then his work has appeared in a number of literary publications and has received or been short-listed for awards in New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland. Prizes for his poetry include an equal first place in the 2006 Yellow Moon Spirit of Place competition, first place in the International Tertiary Student Poetry section of the 2009 Bauhinia Literary Awards, and Best First Book in the 2011 IP Picks competition. In 2009 he completed a Master of Letters in creative writing through Central Queensland University.
Keith currently lives in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Before joining the New Zealand Army as a Regular Force Cadet in 1964, he went to school in Northland and Auckland. During his time in the Army and after leaving it in 1985, he has lived in many places in New Zealand and travelled extensively throughout the country and overseas. His working life has centred on teaching and learning and development in the workplace.
Interactive Press
The Literature Series
Tongues of Ash
Keith Westwater
Interactive Press
an imprint of IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
Treetop Studio • 9 Kuhler Court
Carindale, Queensland, Australia 4152
sales@ipoz.biz
ipoz.biz/IP/IP.htm
First published by IP in 2011
© Keith Westwater, 2011
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Author: Westwater, Keith.
Title: Tongues of ash / Keith Westwater.
ISBN: 9781921869273 (ebk.)
Subjects: Travel--Poetry.
New Zealand poetry.
Dewey Number: NZ821.4
For Margret
Acknowledgements
Front Cover Image: from Dawn Poem for Taranaki (1,000 x 2,000 mm, mixed media, 2005) by Turi Park
Jacket Design: David Reiter
Author Photo: Photography by Woolf Ltd
Some of the poems in this collection have appeared in Landfall, JAAM, Snorkel, Idiom 23, Yellow Moon, and the New Zealand Poetry Society’s 2006 anthology Tiny Gaps and 2010 anthology across the fingerboards.
The author wishes to express his thanks to the many people who have supported and helped him in different ways bring this work to fruition, including his wife Margret, daughter and son, Haidee and Logan, and their partners Gregor and Jo; Dr Lynda Hawryluk, Kristin Hannaford, and Stephen Butler – staff at Central Queensland University; members of the writing groups to which he belongs or has belonged (Debbie Bax, Michal Bigger, Juanita Deely, Martin de Jong, Patricia Donovan, Trish Harris, Tim Jones, Jan Jordan, Keith Lyons, Fionnaigh McKenzie, Clare Needham, Heidi North, Kerry Popplewell); members of ASLEC–ANZ (Association for the study of literature, environment and culture – Australia and New Zealand) particularly Charles Dawson, Dinah Hawken, David Young and the late Geoff Park; Les Roberts, te Reo Māori[1] student, for help with te Reo herein; and finally Dr David Reiter and the team at IP.
[1] the Māori language
Contents
Map of Places in the Poems
Key:
1. Canterbury Visit, Winter 1982
2. Fragments from 1967
3. Burn time, Town statue talk
4. Rivers that feud with the sea
5. Trieste Street Trilogy
6. The goose egg rock
7. Return trip to the Hawkes Bay
8. The Snow-Sayer
9. Coming back from leave
10. Rangipo grounding
11. Navigation point on the Desert Road
12. The sinews of Ohau Bay
13. Petone Beach
14. The West Winds gang is back; The Stations of the Bucket Man
15. Wellington Southerly
16. What we were doing on Wahine Day
17. My first big empty
18. Camera Obscura revealed
19. Papaitonga Reserve in the duck-shooting season
20. Very easily worked
21. River talk
22. Yet another poem on home thoughts from abroad and gorse
Map sources:
1. Outline map of New Zealand – Dreamstime
2. Wellington terrain map inset – Google Earth
A basket of apple trees
Memories of place
Canterbury Visit, Winter 1982
You clasp a shabby quilt
of dun and brown.
Memories from years before
at first stay locked away
like the snow water
in your mountains
marching north and south.
No storms call to your Port Hills,
which are as bare as the trees
that trellis your sky.
But then, they always did.
Even as I enter the city
of my first true love
you get coy
clutch up a skirt of fog.
Once again
I have to fumble my way.
Poems to the West Coast
Fragments from 1967
I remember rain
when the train
came through the portal
beech trees, trunks black
as though licked by flames
that never stood a chance
Moana’s empty platform
soft drops on Lake Brunner
dark amoeba pools
(or was it Dobson?)
wagons awash with coal
Burn time
They say it always rains on the Coast
but Coasters who have been away
know they’ll not get as good a tan
in Palmerston North1
as they will in Hokitika.
Town statue talk
On mid-winter nights
in Hokitika
Robbie Burns, Richard Seddon2
and the Unknown Digger
get down from their pedestals
and meet behind St. Mary’s
for a Monteiths –
except for Robbie
who has a single malt.
At first they talk about
the eighteen-sixties
when the town had
one hundred and two hotels
ten thousand souls
and nuggets in the creek.
They next discuss
the West Coast rugby team’s
last match.
Aye, the best laid schemes…
moans Robbie.
What we need
thumps King Dick
is more resources
and a distribution plan.
But the Digger
just takes a swig
looks to the hills and says
There’s gold inside ’em –
we just need
to work it out.
Rivers that feud with the sea
The Haast rages at the sea
when in flood
rips boulders big as trucks
from the knees and feet of giants
hurls them in the ditch.3
The Waiho runs to the sea
from the nose of a river of ice
which very slowly pokes its t
ongue in – and
out, as it bench-presses
mountains of snow.
The Grey races for the sea
but, barred from its prize
wins instead
the bones of boats and ships
and the tears of fishermen’s widows.
The last word
Don’t you throw rocks at me
retorts the sea
cuts up rough
slings trees
at the giants
The goose egg rock
A small rock, still smooth
once white, now grey
sits on my desktop today
picked from a beach thirty-four years ago
south of Kaikoura, north of Goose Bay.
Jum said be impressed by the goose eggs
laid down on the beach by the sea
laid down in the sea by the Clarence.
I may not have been so
but you were away.
In Central Otago we laughed
when Jum said Look out for schist tor!
But rock-spotting ardour
is suppressed by the goose bumps of love.
Our kids found more rocks for my desk.
You are still my tor today.
Trieste Street Trilogy
for Steve Hobbs
I
Tall pines, gracelessly aged
lived across the road.
Their long limbs spun wind into sea –
at night, waves laved us to sleep.
Garages squatted under the trees.
When the Manawatu gales blew
people scurried to retrieve cars
fearing falling trees.
Cones pot-shotted our roof
but no pines fell. We re-berthed
Stepping-stone stumps stood
where the trees once grew.
The garages had been felled too
but the wind still blew.
Even now, I hear surf in that street.
II
The first time in Trieste Street, father-in-law Steve
helped me put in a vegie garden, double-dug the bed
lined the vegies up with string, marched them in in rows.
I fed the Big Lizzie tomatoes 5 lb superphosphate,
2 lb blood and bone, 2 lb sulphate of potash –
a nineteen forty-six brew Steve used in his market gardens.
When I cleaned and oiled the spade and hoe and rake
and the Big Lizzies grew huge, I think he thought
I showed promise as a son-in-law.
On our return
I put in a no-dig garden, planted equidistantly
built a compost heap between straw bales
watered everything with chook-poo tea.
Steve breathed in the compost, said it was good stuff.
We knew the tomatoes weren’t up to much.
III
paddocks beyond
a corrugated-iron fence
saw-leaved trees nearby
Elderberries, said Steve
you could make wine
come autumn
the hot water cupboard
housed musts –
buckets of black blood
from plucked berries
eight years on
we pitched tent again
three houses
further west
(no wine this time)
Cassie, our sentry
white labrador
challenged every car
that breached the street –
except Steve’s
Return trip to the Hawkes Bay, St. Valentines Day Weekend, 2004
The first cicadas broke through
the earth’s crust
as we left home
dopey, green, flying badly.
Near Otane, on a low hill
the bungalow bent time
with its sentinel
of phoenix palms.
North of Dannevirke
cabbage trees still lined
the railway track
presenting arms.
The Bay was a basket
of apple trees
trailing wine-lovers
naked ladies in the fields.
They’re all lotus-eaters
up there you know
a friend warned us
a decade ago.
The storm broke coming back.
When we got home
cicadas chain-sawed
the wind.
The moon is lashed by trees
Weather, seasons, water, light, rocks, planets, stars
Winds and time
Throughout our lives blow many winds and gales.
Tomorrow’s forecast is for dangerous gales.
Loved ones and their dreams are drowned at sea
when storms cause ships on shoals to sail.
At night, the moon is lashed by trees
while men go mad from days of nor’west gales.
Wind on sand makes seas of crescent moons
and sand on winds of time all life assails.
Take my hand, Margret my love, we’ll climb the tops
lean forward, yell, push back tomorrow’s gales.
The love of rocks and water
You can see it in the way water
with its many fingers, seeks to
tickle the feet of mountains, then waits
at the high gully and scree face for rocks
into her arms to roll, tumble, fall.
But her hard, cold sister, long
jealous of rocks’ endurance and long
life, takes revenge on water
and at night contrives their fall
getting under skins, driving wedges into
the heart of rocks.
So water saves her tears and waits
to smooth rocks’ scars, take up their weight
as they together start their long
odyssey downhill. Then rocks
in creeks and streams are soothed by water’s
laughter, murmur, lilt, as the two
entwined toward the sea do fall.
At times, within their journey’s pitch and fall
water sets rocks at rest, caresses, waits.
The pair are troubled too
by turbulence and flood, but not for long.
Though finally, when water
reaches sea, she releases rocks
so the issue of their closeness and rocks
themselves into the depths can gently fall.
At last reposed, they start to bear water’s
load. In the chrysalis of sea’s weight
through echelons of time as long
as time itself, they are reborn to
form sandstone, siltstone, mudstone, to
begin, with the patience of rocks
that other tectonic feat, the long
crossing through the passing fall
of ages that presses, folds, lifts their weight
as mountains above the oceans’ waters.
Thrust aloft, they tremble and start to fall
as rocks again, for they can hardly wait
to taste once more the long embrace of water.
Light and water
diamonds dance on the sea
ice crystals loop the moon
day skies emblazon Noah’s arc
and the aurora australis throws
the mother of all soundless discos
across the southern dark
Song of the Climate Canaries
melted permafrost, drunken trees
reports of iceberg fleets at sea
birds with GPS astray
is there time? can you see?
whitened bones of coral reefs
expiring trees, rising seas
incidents of phantom springs
what to do? how to be?
ozone holes, desert creep
polar bears all at sea
lethal droughts, killer floods
should we stay? should we flee?
death of frogs, disease in bees
poisoned land from dying seas
global glacier demise
what becomes of you and me?
All in a day’s work
The Earth walks the same route round the sun each year –
quick, fill the vases up with water – here comes Spring!
The Earth leans to the sun, pirouettes, calls it a day.
It will do it again tomorrow. Let’s drink to that.
Once a lunar-month the water in our brains is tugged.
Stack the watch with police – there’s a full moon out tonight.
We gather up the days and weeks and pool them into months
and years – then they burst the dam as we wind down.
The sun abseils the sky each day and burns out in the west –
water the garden before it’s light and help it re-ignite.
Astrological gardening
The heavy summer night
hung like velvet drapes
from heaven. From our
French doors I saw
a galaxy of flowers –
hydrangea moons
comets of foxgloves
an impatiens milky way.
The astrologers ancien
were sleepless shepherds
who forsook counting sheep
for stars. They planted leo, libra
virgo in the sky – perhaps
they were gardeners by day.
The pattern of standing gulls
I can tell which way
the wind is blowing
by observing each day
the bevy of black-backed gulls
gathered on the river gravels
below the bridge that takes me
from here to there and back again.
They preen, splash about a bit
squawk raucously
but always stand into the wind