Poem 349

This is from a memory of my dad taking munted golfballs to a black sand beach to dispose of them by hitting them into the sea … I’ve just dredged the name of the beach up from memory – it was Newdicks Beach (not a typo) just along from Maketu on private land and the black swathes of sand turn out to be from the volcanic mineral  titanomagnitite … especially on a grey day I find black sand beaches bleak and oppressive as if the iron ore somehow weighs everything down …

( I particularly like boilermade sky, dark furrowing of swell and how the hooking and slicing is echoed at the end by the billhook … )

Black Sand

The surf hitting hard against the density
of metal
                plating dark curves
across the beach where my father
       drives golfballs
                                      hooking and slicing
into the shapeless ocean

black sand black waves iron
dragging everything down
                                                         in the water
         in the gulls weighted to the shore
rusting on the boilermade sky

             katipos like brooches in the dunes

my father tees off
                                    each a perfect
        hole in one
                                its
snapper-size splash waiting beyond the dark
furrowing of swell
                                     the two iron
taking wet black slashes
out of the beach
                                 a billhook
                                 hacking down a whale