11-01-2016, 03:44 AM
A Matapouri story my father told me
A young boy on his way to school
along a bush track, distracted
by a huia, chased it ‘til he stopped,
lost in the farm backblocks,
the shape of the hills alien.
Climbing the highest, the child found
no sign of the sea that faced his home,
just dark green waves of trees,
furrows of shadowed gullies
stretching in all directions.
Clouds covered the sun,
no shadows fell; he couldn’t tell
time or directions now, moss grew
on all sides of the tree trunks.
He tried to follow a creek;
rotting wood almost choked it,
dark fern fronds overhung
treacherous footing.
He followed a ridge instead, came
down into a clearing covered in mist
that half hid the ruins of a building.
He’d been to every settlement
along the coast yet didn’t know this place.
A woman in old-fashioned clothes
came towards him, smiling,
drew him water from a well.
Thirsty, he drank, looked up —
she’d vanished. The ruins, the well,
all gone. He dropped the cup, ran, fell,
picked himself up to run again,
‘til he found himself somehow
on the track back home.
He came across her face once,
in the family photo album, identified as
his great-grandmother, the one
who died of sorrow, so they said
when her youngest son was lost in the bush
near here, and never found.
A young boy on his way to school
along a bush track, distracted
by a huia, chased it ‘til he stopped,
lost in the farm backblocks,
the shape of the hills alien.
Climbing the highest, the child found
no sign of the sea that faced his home,
just dark green waves of trees,
furrows of shadowed gullies
stretching in all directions.
Clouds covered the sun,
no shadows fell; he couldn’t tell
time or directions now, moss grew
on all sides of the tree trunks.
He tried to follow a creek;
rotting wood almost choked it,
dark fern fronds overhung
treacherous footing.
He followed a ridge instead, came
down into a clearing covered in mist
that half hid the ruins of a building.
He’d been to every settlement
along the coast yet didn’t know this place.
A woman in old-fashioned clothes
came towards him, smiling,
drew him water from a well.
Thirsty, he drank, looked up —
she’d vanished. The ruins, the well,
all gone. He dropped the cup, ran, fell,
picked himself up to run again,
‘til he found himself somehow
on the track back home.
He came across her face once,
in the family photo album, identified as
his great-grandmother, the one
who died of sorrow, so they said
when her youngest son was lost in the bush
near here, and never found.