In that good season of 1920
the night fires
on the Moeraki coast
never went out -
boat after boat
coming back full
from the groper grounds
in the south;
the Akura nearly lost its way
caught in a big wind
with Davey roped to the tiller
for nine hours
searching the blackness
for the lights -
& Jack in the wheelhouse
keeping water
off the engine;
in the end the cliffs were
so close to the boat
that Jack could smell the smoke
from the fires;
man they were lucky those two -
the wind & the rain did their best
all that night
to sweep the flaming wood
off the hills
& into the sea.
They left marks here - few, but marks,
and bore the prejudice & the murder
of their own people with stoicism
born while travelling the unknown
in white ships;
they left marks here - fine scales
which tackled measures
as delicate as feathers,
and boxes which held out the memory
of a faraway sun on loess hills
and clouded the present
so that even as men in the goldfields
they were not men as the others,
but movements - with clouds, with winds,
as waters ran, they moved;
where they died, hills were their headstones -
pigtail, family,
farm & folly spread deep in a strange earth.