Poem 142

Rotorua was a forestry town … on a school trip we’d been shown it, a massive spinning steel drum lined on the inside with jagged teeth that would tear the bark off a tumbling pine trunk as it was fed through – the stuff of nightmares …

… on the one hand the image of the debarker seems to be round the wrong way – I was writing about the moments when you start to build up a covering of bark to protect your sensitivity – but looking at it now I wonder is it actually a gradual stripping away, each painful thing leaving your skin more raw to the world …

The Debarker

This boy I knew at school
took me into the trees one day
and said yeah
that was my father who was killed
last week in the mill
                      he fell
onto the conveyor belt and went
into the debarker 
head first

I'd seen the debarker
I put my hand up to my head

his father took us to the beach once
and stood out in the surf
throwing us into the waves
first him then me
one after the other
into the breaking of the waves

when we came out of the trees
some kids who knew all about it
started laughing at me
because I still had my hand up to my head
like it hurt
and they kept on laughing
and even the boy whose father it was
had a funny sort of smile
so finally
I started laughing too