Memento Mori at Christchurch
The noise of a rattling fender
on the wheel
of the telegraph boy’s bicycle
must have been the wingbeat sound
of the angel of death
to families at home awaiting news
from other distant wars.
How did they hear, in Christchurch?
What screaming phone call,
sombre uniform
or lifted sheet
etched acid truth
across the face of hope?
These rows of whitened chairs,
stand now like tombstones,
and only quiet sadness lingers,
unobtrusive as some old beggar,
yet persistent in the air
as morning birdsong,
keens the south-east wind
from off the Great South Sea;
a memorial this,
it supplicates remembrance
for these deaths
too recent for oblivion’s monument
of timeless blank grey stone.
No Gallipoli battlefield,
no conscious sacrificial valour,
just the impersonal crushing out
of so much bright might-have-been.
Sadness stands back now,
hands folded,
waiting out the pain
on the doorstep of another night
as the messenger boy
goes rattling through
the streetlight pools
to anyone’s house but ours.
Mt Aoraki Glacier Hike
Mt Cook grumbles glacier tongues
to Canterbury’s plains.
10,000 years of secret thoughts
its ice and rock contains.
From lava world and water
to accidental life,
its fossils add their whispers
unconcerned with joy or strife.
And we who walk the high trail, stand
recording what appears —
a photographic record of
the mountain’s gravel tears.
Mt Cook grumbles glacier tongues
though no one comprehends,
the end of glaciers, maybe life,
our presence here portends.
Gunn Camp Sand Flies
Pterodactyls didn’t die;
they just got smaller by and by.
Though just to keep proportions true
their nasty dispositions grew
‘til they became this tiny mite
with one voracious appetite.
So, every bit they bite from you
(outside, inside, at the loo)
is just the present way they strive
though small, to swallow you alive,
but failing that, they’ll let suffice
the carving off a little slice.
New Zealand south is where we found
each other, out near Milford Sound,
at Gunn Camp where for years they’d fed
on husky work crews whom they’d bled
until their progeny acquired
with every generation sired
a taste for human flesh and blood.
They swarmed, insatiable, a flood.
We swatted, cursed and scratched in vain;
we bitched and twitched in itch and pain,
and soon as we could see the dawn
we wanted to be packed and gone.
From hordes of hungrier flies we’d flee,
tyrannosaurus progeny.
Trail Meeting
We smile at people met
on trails to cataracts
or chasms, battlefields,
or some historic site.
We sidle past, not touching,
nodding thanks for granted
narrow right-of-way perhaps,
and may not think
that every one we pass,
wherever, any time,
has come or goes to meet
some watershed, or battlefield,
or some historic site
that only they can know.
Maori Meeting
We breathe the same air
nose to nose
with no defences thus:
hands clasped,
heads touching,
eyes unfocussed,
so much “I am your breath” are we.
And so it always is:
you are the air I breathe,
defenceless,
in the blind assurance
hand and heart and mind
we share,
will guide us
on the path we walk
this life.
New Zealand Farewell
New Zealand, we have loved this land
of long white clouds, of long long sand
crystal air and crystal streams
forests, plains and glacier gleams,
mountain sentinels that stand.
We’ve seen the way this culture blends
history’s values, modern trends;
institutions that display
fierce convictions, fiercer play,
converting tourists into friends.
Memories that we’ll cherish most
at home on our Canadian coast
are the way you shared yourselves with us
in hostels, homes, on train and bus.
You’ve been a kind and gracious host.