Sir Winston Regrets the Lack of a Statue

Churchill
was to be the name
Churchill City
a good crisp sound
for a decent stretch of land
suburbs factory plots
new fangled shopping malls
beaches parks hills farms
good country homes
patches of wilderness

 
and all the peoples
of the old Empire
and their temples and speech

 
but they named it
for the harbour
and why not
a good width of water
between low land forms
light shapes and reshapes precise
for the water colourist

I regret though a statue
me looking down a cigar
towards peaking harbour heads
hinting at immensities
beyond

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a little script for Keisha Castle-Hughes

not Paikea

but Jonah

to LA

& then keeping performances up

& the lens look

staying on carpets

texting in intervals

to some ordinary place

& now at the school table

finding space enough for knees

and new roles

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David Lange

I spoke it

check in Hansard

and suddenly everyone was walking

a fresh direction in their heads

and the first Adam was Smith

and we were in

for de Lange durée

another age of the Crystal Palace

(no shangais by request)

the bottom line even in arts

wasn't perhaps

a fine derriére

yet minds

in their New Age

would flinch from the John Mills

grinding out reasons

preferring maybe astral souls

('aura aura' murmurs the Speaker)

to whit for instance a wit

on the dinner circuit

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Lai Tang at Ambury Farm Park

each wave's a quiet breath

deep, though,

will shove this log

at the gorse

only the breath of that mountain,

Lai Tang, is stronger,

its whistle snort of fire,

stone, ash

or the breath in you

running hair dancing,

touching infant animals,

sharing sharp smells

on fingers, laughing

sea winds rush

shadows through grass

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a Papatoetoe periplus (a sailor's guide)

and as soon as I brought the vessel
from our good Grecian Massalia
between the Pillars of Hercules,
wind of unstoried ferocity hounded us.
Eons of chaos brought us to the bounds
of Ocean where I gratefully could urge
the cracked prow across a bar
into a deep harbour noting landmarks
for no one to follow, find a placid little bay,
and work warily along a creek to a raised
and level place by swamps dinning with ducks
and plump blue birds rooting in bullrush and sedge.

our amphora of oil, wine, fermented fish, we'd long
tossed off to keep sprung planks from foundering.
We found nothing at hand for a city nor polis,
tore from our mud fast hulk its wormy timbers
for huts, set a rock we had no tool to batter
on a scoria bed as temple whatever gods of hurricanes
and poor luck preyed here. We settled, shameless
barbarians, into working boughs and vines into tools,
trapping birds, finding plants that could not kill
nor twist our guts, cursing daily derelict Olympians.

and if anyone should after us be driven to this place,
perhaps they'll find in the scraps we leave
omens of ceaseless toil and solitary fate.

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Addendum to the Minutes of the Papatoitoi Road Board, 1868

the members stand in hats off
wonderment at the vision of the motorway
its pure obliteration of landscape
the tea-tree and toetoe only at margins
exotics blooming a median free of pukeko

carts and metallic enclosures
hurtle in a vaporous effluvium
tasting perhaps of oil-wet wick
water on the smooth cambers flares
in admirable arcs across an absence
of turds or urine pools

the chairman considers a psalm
or verse but nothing fittingly
flutters his windpipe and mute they ride away
on farm horses wondering who
to speak of this boon with

                      (though certainly never wives occupied with butter
                      mantles or housekeeping ledgers

eyes idly estimating angles
as a brace of teal wind-lever
to ditches beyond a fresh gorse hedge

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