Earlier this week, New Zealand’s finest newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, published one of my recent poems – ‘Tui’. I had hoped to simply be able to provide a link to an online version of the poem but unfortunately none has appeared. Therefore, and particularly for the benefit of those outwith New Zealand who do not have access to the ODT, here ’tis:

The twelfth of
September felt like the
end of all
time. The feared turning
away and vastness of
noiselessness, cup of
bitterness,
undoing of dreaming
and the breaching
open of a wall that
refuses to be
dammed. There can be
now no journey backwards. This
long tide shall stay out. The
bow has been hard bent –

there shall be
no more music.

The nineteenth: we left
the trail, hacked our
way down through
autumn scrub, carrying
the too-small box to the
horizontal slide
of stones that
form the bank by
the River Garry, along
the Pass of Killiecrankie where
we stopped,
to surrender thanks and
to seek goodbye and
to cast our unfinished weight to
the mercy of the current.

[This poem first appeared in the Otago Daily Times, 29 October 2012, p. 9. The beautiful image, ‘Autumn, River Garry at Killiecrankie, Scotland’, is provided by Lindsay Mackinlay, and is used by permission].