Poem 128

I’ve seldom written so directly about New Zealand and its split personality so for me this is a significant poem … I put it into White Cloud the show I did with Tim Finn which was all about the good and bad of this country of our birth … I was thinking about the way our ‘New Zealand Christmas tree’ blossoms the colour of blood and how the Christmas season is traditionally a time of tolls – road drowning murder domestic violence … the crimes mentioned are all from one Christmas in the eighties but interestingly the Red Fox murder has been back in court and back in the news recently …

( I feel I nailed some things here – evocative eeriness of slaughter pulls its wagon a few inches, gross-out visceral discomfort of five echelons of invaders crunching offal together in McDonalds, their children running screaming on strange green turf, mob mentality pack behaviour and schadenfreude in all the usual locations … )

Pōhutukawa

The country hunches into Christmas
streets full of sand and stains
    red needles scattered from the blood-blushed
green tree
messages of death fly across
our thin width
                    we wait for our Christmas dead
to unwrap their shattered drained
drowned bodies
to count
            and compare

in the Adelaide Rd Post Office the Northcote Motel
the Red Fox
                 slaughter pulls its wagon a few inches
and stops
in Newtown McDonalds we tie our savagery
between our teeth blowing smoke
through filed incisors
           five echelons of invaders
           crunching offal together

the Greek with the gold coin
welded to his knuckle
                        wants to know why
we put up with these Maori gangs
                  while five races of children run screaming
        on strange green turf
of the Ronald McDonald playground

red needles fall
steady drops of blood in the unpanicked streets
where we step over
our history
             needles silting on the cars we drive
             as if no one else exists
blood red needles in the beds
where we try not to bite
as we make love

for we are a primitive race
appropriate to this tree
                                 shedding its sharp
spore

we approach Christmas eager to kill
eager to die
                 eager to see 
the stone take someone else’s
head off
         New Years Eve
                          at the Mount
or under sweet chimes
                                of reason

midnight in Cathedral Square