ECLOGUE: CHRISTCHURCH IN WINTER
Ultima Cumaei venit iam
carminus est:
magnus ab entergo sæclorum
nascitu ordo.
- Virgil, Eclogue IV*
In Te Wai
Pounamu, winter comes in hard
straight
off the Antarctic ice floes, scything low
over the
flat scrub of the plains and outside
the
sheltered harbours Tāwhirimātea of the storms
lashes at
Tangaroa’s
glum lead waters with his fists.
In
the wet
black sand, the godwits print angelic biographies
with their
bird-foot cuneiform before
they take
off for the warmer lakes of Siberia.
North
Hagley Park smokes like an old piece
of roof
tin chucked on a tip fire,
with the
breath of people and bare willows
in this
grey steel freezer of a South Island cold snap.
Joggers
and dogs towing their people cough up
expanding
gypsophila blooms.
Far out,
resting on the surface of the nation
of groper,
terakihi and the ugly roughy, a Russian
trawler
captain looks to an angry black horizon,
dreaming
of a bountiful catch.
The office
lemming plucks files from the cabinet,
delicately
like Orpheus strumming his lyre.
He looks
out into the raw grey day and
moves
closer to the heater.
As soon as
afternoon tea is over, darkness falls.
Spring
becomes
a bitter
aftertaste and talk of cherry blossom
drops out
of frequency.
The
Southerly chooses to whistle
a subzero
tune from the Ice Age’s greatest hits
until my
cheeks burn like beetroot.
The
streets are stuccoed, candy-coated –
Jack
Frost’s crack troops
are
parachuting in through a sky dirty white on white:
Scandinavian
camouflage,
a charcoal
picture, the trees are by Mondrian.
This
monochrome remains
even after
I shut my stinging eyes.
Earlier versions of this poem were first published in Big Sky: A Collection of Canterbury Poems, edited by Bernadette Hall and James Norcliffe, Shoal Bay Press, 2002, and later in Wildes Licht: Poems/Gedichte Aus Aotearoa Neuseeland: Englisch-Deutsch, edited by Dieter Riemenschneider, Tanzlit, 2010, where it is also translated into German.
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