WILD SWANS AT PAEKĀKĀRIKI

‘old altars will be overturned’
Jacqui Sturm, ‘Good Friday’

Toward Raumati in a butter-yellow
dawn five black swans swim north
while a camper-van hurtles south
down The Parade, a message writ
above the cab: JESUS IS COMING.
From one house a Ukrainian flag,
from another the United Tribes
of 1835. And the swans progress.

There’s a poem on a plaque on a
post that stands beside the sea
that warns us all: ‘Old altars
will be overturned.” A boy runs
round and round Campbell Park.
He wants to be Christian Cullen.
The septic tank truck lumbers by
after Jesus who’s departing fast.

Did ever a day dawn like this
on Papa-tū-ā-nuku? The answer
to that common question is
always different, always correct.
The mind is a beach, or words to
that effect, the poem says. Infinite.
Hour by hour the sand shifts and shifts.
And the swans have already flown.

Murray Edmond

Murray Edmond: born Kirikiriroa 1949; lives in Glen Eden, Tāmaki-makau-rau. Recent publications: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s (Atuanui Press,  2021) – cultural history; FARCE and Sandbank Sonnets: A Memoir, (Compound Press, 2022) – 2 books of poems; Aucklanders (Lasavia, 2023), a book of 15 short stories.