HOMEGOING

Timaru is Portmeirion where Patrick McGoohan

is forever pursued by malignant balloons.

My birth city, quaint and Edwardian capital of propinquity,

shelter of cabbage trees, where old wives sit

where their mothers and mothers’ mothers sat

twitching curtains, judging and tut-tutting.

There Caroline Bay is a perfect papaya slice

of white porcelain.

There Richard Pearce in his heart flew and harbour

of champion boxers, quasi-divine

racehorses, master poets and heroic painters.

Riviera of the South - but then everything

is something else of somewhere with that coordinate

 - lingering in its hermetic

Shangri-la of an afternoon; unchanging, immutable.

I like to go to the low walls of the bay and read the names:

Trescault, Crèvecœur, Puiseaux,

Paschendale, Miraumont, Rossignol.

That’s its own poetry.

An earlier version was published in Landfall Spring 2009