Whitianga Testament

Je suis l’espace où je suis
(Noël Arnaud)

Shells, pools, holes in the mudflat,
edges, ledges, shelves and hollow places;
homes: so utterly these
are homes for each particular inhabitant.
Each creature is its habitat,
its space the locus of its movement.

I walk the waterline at dusk, the mud
at low tide sucking at my feet,
these little brown and olive crabs
scuttling from me. Look.
They scud across a broken image of the
moon
scattered over saturated land.

I’ve been away from here too long, so long
required to live another life,
so long an actor in a play who somehow
got the stage-directions wrong.
Now I just want to head for home,
a home just where I just aim.

John Allison from Dividing the Light, Hazard Press, 1997

John Allison (1950 -2024), a poet and musician, lived in Heathcote Valley near Christchurch. His debut collection, Dividing the Light was part of the Hazard Poets series, edited by Rob Jackaman and Philip Mead. A Long Road Trip Home was his seventh and final poetry collection (Cold Hub Press, 2023). His previous book, Near Distance, was also published by Cold Hub Press in mid-2019. He was Poetry New Zealand 14’s featured poet, and his poem, Father’s axe, grandfather’s machete, was selected for the Best New Zealand Poems, 2020.

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