Poem 202

And I looked and frowned and the monster was me – David Bowie in The Width of a Circle … I see this as Whirinaki Beach up the coast from Napier where I spent a lot of time as a kid, a beach of stones not sand (in the news lately for rapid coastal erosion threatening houses along the road my grandfather built) …

… this was written when I was 21, first year in Wellington and feeling more than a little alienated – perhaps that’s why I was writing about somebody out of their natural element …

… I intended to subvert – and still admire how this subverts – more standard NZ images of sunny seascapes, instead making sky beach and sea dull dark claustrophobic …

Creature

There is a monster in the sea
they all said
but he stared at the slow grey wave
until he froze his eyes and still
nothing rose or moved

he dribbled his life away
down through rocks
to the knacker's horse sea
and at last 
they brought him down

in a blind black morning
gull-gashed and free
inching forward on the clattering stones
the monster returned to the sea