Camera Obscura revealed14
1. The layered memories of a place
The leaf-touched air
became skies browned at the edges –
the legacy of bush-burning.
Prosperity was built on rivers of ash
balanced by the glare of late spring.
The post colonial landscape
is layered with disruption
leaves referencing
the ploughed furrows of Parihaka.15
Histories have been tucked away
in now un-lived spaces
where cycles of growth
are the currency of decay.
Memories caught tight
in the net of senses.
2. The play of shadows in the bush
We situate ourselves in history
when we see a landscape.
Light into darkness –
a seed of storytelling
tales told around a campfire
god-light in a church.
New Zealand
land of the long, dark shadow.
This is where undergrowth would be
if it hadn’t been
slashed
burnt
grazed.
Go bush…before bush is gone.
3. Camera Obscura
The Knowledge Economy
is a Dawn Poem for Taranaki
where The Forces of Action and Reaction are Equal and Opposite
The Conservation of Linear Momentum
doesn’t apply to Decimal Currency
this is The Church of St. Jack
The Church that Jack Built
Rhopalostylis gives it
Edge Light
Edge Light
Edge Light
Papaitonga Reserve in the duck-shooting season16
for Geoff Park
Snarl of steeple jack
karaka, kowhai, rata
net of wetlands flax
but korimako and tui
as quiet as huia
chary survivors
of the colonial war
on native bush
living safely in
this memorial patch.
Why did we whisper
while walking there?
So the ghosts
of Te Keepa and
his iwi dispossessed
would stay asleep?
Perhaps, or
maybe because
we were disturbing
Tāne Mahuta’s crypt.
Secretly, Buller
would have been pleased
with the next door
nineteenth-century
pastoral scene –
shade tree complete
with cattle, a Constable
less the cathedral,
Wakefield’s New Zealand
rural dream made real.
What has changed?
Shotgun sounds and
the smell of burning
still stain the air.
Barbed-wire fence
and weed spray
keep Papaitonga
at bay. Streams
of Te Keepa’s tears
still feed the lake.
Very easily worked
I’ve looked in awe at remnant stands –
on the Whanganui Inlet
near Okarito and Bruce Bay
grey-blue, they spear the sky.
kahikatea, Podocarpus dacrydioides, white pine
tallest of the native trees
easily sawn and seasoned
no taint or smell
large sizes
defect-free
My ancestors saw them too.
They came in ships with sails from afar
and saw them at the water’s edge, tall, true.
They saw boats and masts and spars
and their children saw weatherboards, framing, flooring, joinery
and their children’s children saw butter boxes, cooperage, wooden-ware.
But Tāne Mahuta beheld with tears the ships with spars.
he knew
he knew
Tāne Mahuta, bringer of
plants, birds, insects
creator of humans
whose whakapapa17 begins with trees
who clothed his mother
with a cloak of giant trees –
kauri, rimu, kahikatea.
kahikatea
kahikatea
Slow grower
lover of coastal ground
alive one thousand years
dead in half an hour.
River talk
Ko au te whenua, Ko te whenua ko au18
The tops of your stop banks
are mid-winter damp
the steeper sides scruffier
than a month ago.
Your natural banks
ranked with sepia trees
are leaf-bare and barely leaved
making you both clothed
and exposed, your surface reflective
less easy to read, summer’s
Monet-Gerard Manley pose
long decomposed. Only
misplaced green-leafed shrubs
relieve the grey and brown.
On the Ewen Bridge’s gravels
today’s hui19 of gulls
is hunkering down –
there’s a southerly coming in.
I should walk by you more often
Hautonga, but I feel unease.
Before this walk is over
we need to talk, you and I.
I remember the time
the kids and I tyre-tubed
down you one summer.
There was closeness then
(of a kind). Your beauty
along River Road
and when you are in flood –
I have respect
and even awe for that.
It’s not the tension
of the recent murder
in a dark copse by your banks.
It’s not even the trees themselves
foreigners, placed by engineers
to mark your rights of passage
prescribe the one true way. It’s not
your relationship with the sea –
daily, public, intimate.
I also know that when you flood
the stop banks make you
vomit in the sea. It’s not that.
I need to ask you, Hautonga20
why are you not the awa21 in my mihi?22
It’s been twenty years
and I don’t yet know
why we are not connected.
Your wairua23 doesn’t talk to me.
Our banns were never read.
There have been other awa –
the ones I learnt at school
to name and draw on maps.
I see them now (but never then)
as the veins of Maui’s24 fish
and the run-off from his waka.
You didn’t even get a mention
but you’re more a windpipe
than a vein. Some of these...
maybe we tangoed now and then.
The pull for me, though
is towards the fish’s tail.
So why is that?
But you know I know
the answer to all this already.
Your flood in me is the memory
of a northern whānau25-tree
weak-rooted, whose heart
was killed and limbs lopped off
in acts not since accounted for.
Despite these things
that tree’s terroir is in me
and I still long for
the streets, places, faces
of my youth
to be my home
to be my mother-land
though I still grieve for
possibilities which ceased to be
when the axe bit deep.
Before
I turn away
I need to say I see you
as living in
a different paradigm of time
though for both of us
nothing ever stays the same.
It must seem only hours ago
you were free to leave your silt
high up in the Valley’s trees;
on current trends my children
will be history’s chaff
before one of your day’s ends.
And I know you know
the efforts of the engineers
(who think they can control
your constancy of change)
are but a tickle in your throat:
trees and stop banks
will be as play-works in a
five-hundred-year flood.
Evensong in a graveyard of villas
The pines on the ridge are about to cede
their colour to the night. Once more
light’s absence will shroud this place.
Not even car-lights on the highway below
(such is their need for road when it’s dark)
re-mark the trees – their placement
their particular explanation of green.
Soon the evening will lay claim too
to vestiges of villas which once stood
in the bush beneath the pines –
orphaned lawns, homeless paths
rhododendron that flower
among five-finger, tree fern, rata.
These last artefacts mark the bones
of grand abodes. These and a plaque
at the site of each home
listing its name, its history of dwellers
its date of sacrifice to the road.
Field trip
What was special about the place?
It’s just another piece of bush.
Could you smell the past all around?
I’d rather have been at home.
Did you feel the ghosts in the trees?
It was damp – and very cold.
You know that huia once lived here?
Dead birds aren’t my thing.
Was there nothing for you there?
It’s a waste of time and space.
Tourists on safari for nirvana
Places overseas – experienced and imagined – and thoughts of home
Yet another poem on home thoughts from abroad and gorse
Behind a flat
in London’s Fordwych Road
four cabbage trees
marooned in their O.E.
fan the bar-be-cues
of kiwis left-the-nest
but I didn’t see a kereru
piwakawaka, or kaka
in a kotukutuku tree
when biding time
in Brighton’s gardens
though the yellow stars
at the back of Waiwhetu
came sharply into view
when, amongst the larkspurs
hollyhocks, and roses
I found an Orsman’s Gorse.
At Double Bay
The streets were paved with Beamers.
Latté-grazing blondes
draped the café tables.
You looked for tops
in boutique shops
and the Sydney light was
yellow bright
yellow bright.
Facial impressions
On the map it’s a runny nose
dripping Florida’s Keys
into the Gulf of Mexico.
But when the Beach Boys sing Kokomo
I still join in – Key Largo, Montego…
Come on pretty mama
That’s where you wanna go…
Although you can’t say Everglades to me
without large birds flapping their gantry wings
as they fly away from the evil
that slithers into the swamp
near those ghoul-like cypress trees
dreadlocked in Spanish moss.
And you can’t say Lake Okeechobee
without me seeing the mass murderer
who is really innocent
running through the lake-edge water
looking over his shoulder and tripping
when he hears the sound
of the blood hounds
that he can’t see through the mist
that parts then shrouds
the spectral trees.
And if you say Miami to me
I say vice, Don Johnson
the film whose names I can’t remember
with the Florida chapter of the mafia
that the Chicago Godfather
wants to rub out/pencil in
for an unstable alliance
between the New York bosses
and the Cuban connection
that morphs to the Pelican Brief
that changes into Scarface
starring Al Pacino.
I say it’s the front tooth of a mouth
which is really a womb
annually spawning several children
each with chainsaw limbs
only one eye
and a murderer’s heart.
To the victor the spoils
Our view from the hotel window
bears witness to the fall of Prague –
the Hilton, KPMG, McDonald’s,
and a Coca Cola sign, all in a line.
Yunnan Pines, near Shangri-La
five trunks, black
close-up, thin
filigree of limbs
no leaves or tops
the sky behind
rinsed china blue
dishwater clouds
an old day’s
orange suds
floating high
on coffee grounds
the whole scene
a snapshot map of
antecedents, a GPS
for kin, friends
life’s crossed paths
I always thought
if I climbed out
of my own weave
exiled my past
the weft I tended
for so long would
tear, dissolve; but
this photo doesn’t show
living far away
is impossible today
with internet, jets
tourists on safari for
nirvana, or one more
bungee jump; no, surely
Shangri-La left long ago
for some other earth
The expedition
We crossed the Old Silk Road
west of Samarkand.
Giant orange flares lit our path
in Turkestan. Across the Caucasus
splayed necklaces of light.
On and on we pushed
through Russia’s steppes
following the beacons’ path
to the lowlands on the cusp
of Western Europe’s night.
Faster than all the winds we sped
’til our Captain’s rounded vowels
announced to our delight:
Thanks for flying with us – the crown jewels
are just below, to your right.
Why she is smiling
By paths near the Château d’Amboise, where
da Vinci’s last three years were glazed, fuchsia
sage, fountain grass, begonia, varied leaves
create a fricassee of fronds and stars
much like the Little General’s feathered hats
or those of his hussars and grenadiers.
I wonder if da Vinci ever saw
a fuchsia plant, perhaps the largest in
the world, a tree, whose bark flakes off like rust
from iron wood. Or, one whose painted leaves
reveal true works of art, a tour de force
or the stars: Pink Galore and Annabel.
Their origins are in the Amazon
deceiving gardens Japanese with blooms
like china dolls starring for a ball, hats
from Holland, spindly legs below. I bet
his studio, behind and to his right
had one, when Mona Lisa sat for him.
National Anthem
Which song plays for me
when I am missing home?
the cry of triumph over tyranny?
a call for God to save a queen?
a rally to a bloody flag or banner?
No, none of these.
These are not the things
that sing to me of home.
But if you were to score these notes –
a paddock with a sentry cabbage tree
the noise a kereru makes flying
tree fern unfurling and unfurled
and if you were to hum this tune –
kowhai painting the town yellow
kotare on a washing line
the smell of wet manuka
and if you were to add this chorus –
hills dress-uniformed in bush
the morepork’s call at night
kauri holding up the sky
this is the hymn, the anthem
the waiata26 of my home.
1 Palmerston North, although about 500 km north of Hokitika and much drier, has fewer sunshine hours.
2 Richard Seddon (King Dick) – NZ Prime Minister 1893 – 1906.
3 The ditch – the Tasman Sea.
4 found in Brenstrum, E 1998, The New Zealand Weather Book, Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson
5 Ruapehu is a large, snow-capped volcano 9,174 feet (2,797 m) high. Ngauruhoe is an active volcanic cone to the north of Ruapehu. The Rangipo Desert, a boulder plain formed from lahar and lava flows, lies in a rain shadow to the east of Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe.
6 The ash referred to came from eruptions of volcanoes on the central North Island’s volcanic plateau and can be seen layered in cuttings on the Desert Road.
7 Waiouru – a New Zealand Army military camp 15 miles (24 km) to the southeast of Ruapehu.
8 Cook Strait separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand.
9 Maui – A demi-god who caught the ‘fish’ of the North Island from the waka (canoe) of the South Island. Legend has it that Maui hooked the North Island at Red Rocks on Wellington’s south coast.
10 Matiu/Somes – an island in Wellington Harbour.
11 During a fierce storm on 10 April, 1968 the inter-island ferry Wahine sank in Wellington Harbour over a period of some hours. 51 people lost their lives. Some survivors made it to safety at Eastbourne on the far side of the harbour.