Mrs Field

I think I would have failed if it were not
for my dear bird, who talked unceasingly,
his cage upon my shoulder. By the sea
were miles of grassy dunes; no shade. The lot
of all our worldly goods my husband got
into a heavy swag; the pots for tea,
our bedding and our clothes. Strapped onto me
my son was bundled like a native tot.
The week-long walk it seemed that every wind
on earth was passing here – a constant threat.
My body sheltered boy and parrot both.
The sand abraded me till I felt skinned
alive. Come evening, we’d make camp, and with
a stick I’d dig up grubs to feed my pet.

Airini Beautrais
from Whanganui River Poems, VUP

This poem is from Flow: Whanganui River Poems, a book-length sequence in three parts. The third part of the sequence is written in various sonnet forms, in the voices of different characters from the ancient to recent past, fictional and real. The Fields were a real family who travelled from Wellington to Whanganui, up the coast, in the 19^th century before roads were built. Anyone who knows this coast will know it is wild, windswept, and involves a lot of river crossings, some of which claimed lives in the days of foot and horse travel. The diction in this poem is deliberately dated, and perhaps jarring to a modern ear, but I wanted the whole collection to feel suffused with the voices of ghosts. The thing I like the most about this story is that they did this week-long walk with their pet parrot, which Mrs Field carried in a cage. I don’t know what kind of parrot it was. I think I made up the part about the grubs. There is a beetle, the sand scarab, that lives in the sand as a larvae, and is quite easy to find if you dig.

I realised recently that there is a lot of wind in my poetry, and that it always signifies some kind of ominous mood or emotional disturbance. I find wind irritating and always feel anxious when there are strong gales blowing. I think that underneath the story of Mrs Field, there is also the emotion of the writer. I was going through some challenging life events at the time of writing this collection, and a lot of my sonnets were about shipwrecks. There was something cathartic about writing about history in poetry, using the sonnet forms, and exploring the raw emotional potential behind these stories.

Throughout this section, which is called ‘The Moving Sand’ I wanted the feeling of disembodied voices, washed up like driftwood on the beaches of Castlecliff and South Beach at the mouth of the awa. In the first part of Flow, I focused on Pākehā settlers appropriating Māori land and cutting down native forests: it was people against environment. In this section, the environment shapes people. In the future, we will have to reckon more and more with the forces of nature as extreme weather events intensify. Some of the other poems in Flow deal with climate change and an increase in the likelihood of devastating floods. Nature is all about balance: when we push nature too far, nature pushes back.