TEN THINGS TO MISS ABOUT WAIHEKE ISLAND WHEN I LEAVE ON SATURDAY:

1. The crisp top layer of sand on Onetangi beach and the way your feet sink through its slight resistance into the soft sand underneath. It reminds me of the sensation of biting into a genuine Italian semifreddo ice cream; it’s that kind of feeling – but on your feet instead of in your mouth. Sweet.
2. The saltiness of seawater. I always forget about that because I spend most of my swimming life in indoor pools, but the sea is very salty in the nicest possible way.  Buoyant. Tangy.  Delightful.
3. Watching the ever-changing patterns that wind and tide make across the surface of the sea. It produces mysterious and entirely transient layers and streaks of colour, from bright teal to soft silvery grey. I could watch moving water for hours at a time. And sometimes I almost do.
4. The call of the tui  – Woodside Bay tui don’t imitate the sound of microwaves or car alarms, they only produce that characteristic liquid gurgle.  It’s lovely. They splash around in our birdbath in the late afternoon, too, which is even lovelier.
5. Pukeko. I know: farmers hate them and they can be a general rural nuisance, but they have a firm place in my heart: the sheer absurdity of them. And oh! baby pukeko, all fluffy feathers and staggering on unreliable and uncontrolled long red legs.
6. Kumera. Not any of the recent varieties, please – only the old fashioned purple kind that my Uncle Clive used to grow which are a taste and texture sensation. You can sometimes buy kumera at the shop under New Zealand House in London – the word goes out when a shipment arrives. But sometimes isn’t really enough.
7. Hand-reared cattle in the field next to the house, all turning their heads in synchrony when they hear the farmer’s truck bumping down the track. They look like Wimbledon spectators.
8. The view.
9. The view.
10. The view.

Some letters from December were forwarded to us from London, and finally arrived last week. Mostly Christmas cards – no surprise there – and one of them (from an investment company that Bruce knows from his charity work) carries this witty disclaimer statement.

“This Greeting is unaudited. Seasons may come and go without prior notification. The Season you experience may or may not vary according to your climate of reference. Seasons, or portions thereof, may be unseasonably hot or cold; wet or dry. Past weather should not be construed as a guarantee of future weather. Seasons may involve the passage of time. No Greeting, seasonal or otherwise, can recover your lost youth. Greetings should not be construed as guarantees of particular outcomes in this, or any other, Season. International seasonal Greeting involves transmitting Greetings to recipients residing in different countries. Residing in different countries may be riskier or less risky than residing in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (“UK”) or the United States of American (“USA”). Residing in the UK may be riskier than residing in the USA (or perhaps not). Residing in the euro zone may become impossible. The sentiments expressed herein were accurate as at the time of transmittal. There can be no guarantee that they will continue to apply at the time of receipt. …”

A sort of metaphor for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, perhaps? An incentive to get drunk or hide under the bed during 2012? Or maybe, just to laugh at the absurdities involved in hedging your bets.

The truth isn’t quite that. Not really. I’m not truly home again, I just wish it were the truth – at least, I wish that in one sense. But I also believe that anyone who, for many years, has lived away from where they were born and grew up doesn’t belong anywhere much, any more. Maybe I feel that because I’m a natural-born outsider – an observer rather than a belonger (I’m the most unclubable person I know). Or maybe I feel it because of a deep-seated ambivalence about the nature of identity – my own and others.

But still. Being back again on Waiheke Island (it’s out in the Hauraki Gulf, 35 minutes on a fast ferry from Auckland: North Island: New Zealand. As if you didn’t know, right?) feels like a homecoming. I love it passionately. I talk about “my” island – would that it were – and feel soothed and invigorated by it. I’m suddenly back to writing up a storm every day; I’m walking every early morning along the headland; I’m loving everything about it – the particular pitch of the neighbours’ “coo-ee!” call, the background buzz of cicadas, the bird song, the smell of the sea and the land, the curve of these hills.

And I’ve posted this poem before – two years ago on the Tuesday Poem blog, I find – but I can’t resist posting it yet again. It’s the poem I loved most when I was at Auckland University and it still holds such a powerful resonance for me.
But first, here’s a photo of the headland I walk around at dawn, with the paradise ducks flapping off in a panic, complaining that I’ve woken them, and the cattle staring moonily, and the sheep ignoring me. All great.

And here’s the poem. Enjoy.

TO AN EXPATRIATE
R. D. Fairburn

“Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him: but weep sore for him that goeth away: for he shall return no more, nor see his native country.”
Jeremiah XXII:10

Pine for the needles brown and warm,
think of your nameless native hills,
the seagulls landward blown by storm,
the rabbit that the black dog kills.

Swing with the kelp the ocean sucks,
call to the winds and hear them roar,
the westerly that rips the flax,
the madman at the northeast door.

Dream of the mountain creek that spills
among the stones and cools your feet,
the breeze that sags on smoky hills,
the bubble of the noonday heat.

The embers of your old desire
remembered still will glow, and fade,
and glow again and rise in fire
to plague you like a debt unpaid,
to haunt you like a love betrayed.

And while we’re talking poetry, why don’t you look at what the other Tuesday Poets are offering here: if one of the posts on the sidebar mentions a Tuesday Poem you can be sure there’s a poem in there somewhere.

ARROWTOWN
Denis Glover

Gold in the hills, gold in the rocks,
Gold in the river gravel,
Gold as yellow as Chinamen
In the bottom of the shovel.

Gold built the bank its sham facade;
Behind that studded door
Gold dribbled over the counter
Into the cracks of the floor.

Gold pollinated the whole town;
But the golden bees are gone –
Now round a country butcher’s shop
The sullen blowflies drone.

Now paved with common clay
Are the roads of Arrowtown;
And the silt of the river is grey
In the golden sun.

It was gratifying to discover this poem again, courtesy of the NZ National Library Service and Lizzie, who’s the librarian here in Arrowtown. I don’t think it’s one of Glover’s best –the Sings Harry sequence must be the top of his particular mountain of great work – but there are characteristically lovely images, even so: like the “golden bees” pollinating the town, and the gold dribbling over the counter at the bank.

But I think the “yellow as Chinamen” is a curiously lazy image, and even for the times (I believe this was written in the early 1960s) oddly offensive for such an emotionally astute writer. And yes, I do know that the 1960s are a long way from Helen Clark’s 2003 apology for the anti-Chinese sentiments of earlier years (when she paid tribute to “the unique identity, history and strength of the original Chinese New Zealanders”) but weren’t we mostly beyond all that knee-jerk racist stuff back then? Or is that a false memory distorted by time and wishfulness?

One pleasing update: I don’t know where the butcher’s shop was in the 1960s but I do know where the butcher and his family lived, because there’s an historical plaque on the building. And guess what? It’s now home to the excellent, award-winning Provisions shop and café – no blowflies there!

Anyway, thank you National Library Service, and Lizzie, and Denis Glover.

One hundred and fifty kilometres.

Count them slowly, effortfully and sweatily, one by one – I certainly did.

One hundred and fifty kilometres on a bicycle. There were times when I thought the whole journey was a compelling argument in favour of the combustion engine.

In four and a half days and in blazing heat – though I’d rather have had that, than rain or snow. At times we pedalled with a significant gradient to climb, which was exhausting, but at other times we freewheeled down slopes with the breeze behind us, which was utterly exhilarating. And at all times the journey took place against the background of the most sensational scenery in the world: Central Otago in the South Island of New Zealand. It’s the Rail Trail bike path, which runs along the route of the old railway line that used to go between Clyde and Middlemarch.

Clyde. Alexandra. Galloway. Chatto Creek – great hotel. Omakau. Lauder, which seemed to take for ever to appear. Auripo. Oturehua, and then struggling on to Wedderburn, after which it’s mostly (but by no means entirely) downhill. Ranfurly – unusually bad coffee. Waipiata. Kokonga. Tiroiti. Hyde. Rock & Pillar. Ngapuna. And finally, at last, Middlemarch!

Would I recommend it to you? Well, yes and no. It’s very hard work, and most people don’t admit that when they’re boasting about their feat. They also say anyone could do it, which just isn’t true. Everyone warned me about bum ache but I didn’t find that the worst part – it was the gradients that did for me and my knees.

Also, I fell off – skidded in some loose gravel and slipped sideways, none too gracefully. My shoulder and neck seized up for days.

But did I love it? Yes I did, yes and yes again, especially the sense of achievement: that and the extraordinary scenery. Coming through two tunnels and over a viaduct over the Poolburn Gorge and seeing the lush Maniototo plain stretching away like a vision of the Promised Land was something to treasure. Fields of wild lupins, roses blooming everywhere, sensational contrasting layers of hills and rivers and trees. Birds all the way, and glorious birdsong all day.

And frankly, I’m proud of myself for having done it at all.

Would I do it again? Nope. Not if you paid me all the gold ever found in Arrowtown, which is where we have ended up for a week’s R&R, and where there’s another almost-150 to mark because gold was discovered here in 1862, and the Arrow River became one of the richest sources of alluvial gold in the world. About 8000 miners arrived to pan for it during the 1860s, but now it has a population of about 1200, mostly involved in tourism. It’s the prettiest little town imaginable with many of the original nineteenth century buildings still standing, all surrounded by huge shady trees that were planted by the early settlers. We’re staying in a little cottage built somewhere between 1875 and 1877, where the first Town Clerk lived in 1878 – so a bit grander than a miner’s home. Here’s its website.

I planned to post the poem that the late great Denis Glover wrote about Arrowtown. I’d have thought it would be displayed on every street corner here but the helpful young librarian in the Arrowtown library hadn’t even heard of it. She has now, and a copy is coming from the National Library Service, and when it arrives I’ll post it!

Michael D. Higgins’ time has now come, and is being celebrated all over Ireland. What a joy it is to have a poet President, and especially one who seems a grand guy! And how prescient it was of him to have written this poem. He’s got scenery now, in spades.

When Will My Time Come
by Michael D. Higgins

When will my time come for scenery
And will it be too late?
After all
Decades ago I was never able
To get excited
About filling the lungs with ozone
On Salthill Prom.

And when the strangers
To whom I gave a lift
Spoke to me of the extraordinary
Light in the Western sky;
I often missed its changes.
And, later, when words were required
To intervene at the opening of Art Exhibitions,
It was not the same.

What is this tyranny of head that stifles
The eyes, the senses,
All play on the strings of the heart.

And, if there is a healing,
It is in the depth of a silence,
Whose plumbed depths require
A journey through realms of pain
That must be faced alone.
The hero, setting out,
Will meet an ally at a crucial moment.
But the journey home
Is mostly alone.

When my time comes
I will have made my journey
And through all my senses will explode
The evidence of light
And air and water, fire and earth.

I live for that moment.

There’s a glorious celebratory song by the Saw Doctors – ‘Michael D. Rockin’ in the Dáil’ – here. My recommendation is that (a) you turn it up to a loud celebratory level, and (b) that you dance to it. That’s what poets do.

I’m a bit ashamed not to have known the latest Nobel Prize winner’s poetry before he won the prize this year, but at least it didn’t take me as long to acknowledge Tranströmer as it took the Nobel committee, which has apparently seriously considered him for the prize every year since 1993! Here’s a haunting example of his work for starters.

SYROS

by Tomas Tranströmer

translated from Swedish by Robin Fulton

In Syros harbor leftover cargo steamers lay waiting.
Prow by prow. Moored many years since:
CAPE RION, Monrovia.
KRITOS, Andros.
SCOTIA, Panama.

Dark pictures on the water, they have been hung away.

Like toys from our childhood that have grown to giants
and accuse us
of what we never became.

XELATROS, Pireus.
CASSIOPEIA, Monrovia.
The sea has read them through.

But the first time we came to Syros, it was at night,
we saw prow by prow by prow in the moonlight and thought:
What a mighty fleet, magnificent connections.

I do know it’s only Monday today, so why am I posting a Tuesday poem? Well, it’s mostly because I have the time to to it this afternoon but it’s also because The Tuesday Poem website is based in New Zealand, where it’s already 4 am on Tuesday. You might like to check out the other Tuesday poems, which you can do any day of the week by clicking on the link.

I’m getting great pleasure from listening to The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams.

If you don’t yet know about this CD, the previously unpublished lyrics are from four notebooks found in Hank Williams’ car after his death, and recently set to music by the various musicians who sing on the album. The collection has been curated (a term that’s now used for everything from cake recipes to toolboxes, but in this case I think it’s the right one) by Bob Dylan, who invited eleven other rock and country stars to contribute. Norah Jones, Alan Jackson, Lucinda Williams and Bob Dylan are my favourites so far – but for me, the absolute standout is Jack White singing ‘You know that I know.’

White’s interpretation of the song is glorious. He’s been criticised for introducing a kind of quaver to his voice but I think it works brilliantly; it’s a very Hank kind of sound that complements the very Hank kind of lyrics: from heartbreak to honky-tonk, all in one song.

You know that I know
That you ain’t no good
And you wouldn’t tell the truth
Even if you could
Lying is a habit
You practise wherever you go
And you may fool the rest of the world
But you know that I know …

And I’m a sucker for this bit – it’s the beautifully judged use of ‘correctly’ that so charms me:

And if you recall correctly
I’m the guy that brought you to town

It’s a bluesy sound with a bluesy beat, and I don’t even object to the electric guitars. Thanks, Jack. Nice one. I can’t help thinking that Hank Williams would be impressed. Wouldn’t you, Hank, huh?

Magna Grecia – greater Greece – is the name given to the bits of southern Italy that were colonised by the Greeks two and a half thousand years ago. This map shows the main bit in yellow, around the arch of the ‘foot’ of Italy and up into the ‘heel’ and we particularly wanted to see whatever there was to see, in the way of ancient Greek ruins, when we were in Puglia this September.

In the end we visited only two sites, the ones near Metapontum (now called Metaponto) but they were both so interesting we’d like to try again in a few years with better books, better maps, and more time. Still, what I discovered after we’d been – in that frustrating and irritating way that you do when you haven’t done your research thoroughly before you go – was fascinating. ‘Achean’ is one of the resonant collective nouns used by Homer for the main Greek tribal groups of the time, and it seems that it was the Acheans who sailed west across the Adriatic to Italy: as the poet Allan Curnow put it in a different context, “simply by sailing in a new direction/ you could enlarge the world.” Even more interesting, however, was the discovery that Pythagoras taught and died in Metapontum.

Pythagoras! Who amongst us doesn’t remember their first lesson in geometry and a demonstration of Pythagoras’s most famous theorem: that in a right-angled triangle the sum of the area of the square on the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares of the other two sides: that is, a²+b²=c². Mr Long, teaching maths to Form3Latin1, Takapuna Grammar School: I remember it well. The plane diagram looks like this:

Pythagoras! Who famously said that ‘all things are numbers’ and so his ideas live on in the arcane musings of many modern groups researching the phenomena of numbers, many of which you might think are somewhat towards the cult end of belief systems. The Freemasons are the best known of these groups and I speak as a woman whose grandfathers were both Freemasons, to say nothing of a beloved brother-in-law, so there. Pythagoras left no written records of his ideas; it’s all been passed down through the centuries by others.

Pythagoras! Whose tomb in Metapontum was still being shown to visitors when Cicero visited the town, about 500 years after the great philosopher, mathematician and all-round mystic had died – but it’s not there now. The site is about as big as three rugby fields and most of the remaining materials are low to the ground or reconstructed; they include three temple sites and an enormous amphitheatre, and if I’d known about Pythagoras’s connections I’d have laid a bunch of wild flowers in his memory.