Coming To New Zealand
I am learning different words
for things I have always known.
The towns I travel to stretch out
in unfamiliar grids
with billowing hills between,
green with mangrove and with giant fern.
Birds remain anonymous
in unnamed trees.
I am learning the history and customs
of Godzone, and
only partly out of books.
Taking the train between
Papakura and the Bay
I hear ethereal voices resurrect
old tales and vanished glories
while the wheels turn round adventurously
before they trundle up
to dislocated stations.
I am forced to think myself anew,
can feel my soul is making, counter-revolutions
in this strange hemisphere,
underneath new stars:
"the wrench of beyond."
In my line of descent, mundanely English,
there are no Maori heroes, no pioneers.
Walking a land uncharted by my kin,
I discover
that mostly the road is here.
Occasionally I stumble, falling in
to scrub and bushland, or
tread heavy through
the warm constricting mud of thermal springs.
Its history is its people.
I listen as Maree, petite and elegant,
her creamy skin flushed with the memory,
recounts a possum hunt,
lists gleefully her bounty
and how she helped to blood
a townie pom.
Survival is the game they all still play,
and infiltration's rigorously tested.
Things root and flourish here so easily
there has to be
some measure of what's been
too casually transplanted.
Either the land rejects you, or it won't
let go for good or bad.
No half-measures here.
I think of kiwis, those unlikely birds
that hide away by day, dare not to fly,
birds timid and tenacious.
Perhaps I had to cross the continents
to find a different self, wary and bold,
like these electric skies,
abundant, elastic.
Page(s) 80-81
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