1. south otago coast

Below inch clutha
are blowholes and coves,
long shelving bays where seabirds walk.
The ocean booms to herself
in a victory or anger
I can’t translate.
Only the seals,
gods of these mica sands
and sea mauled points
observe the cloudy heads lined up
as this wind sculpted coast recedes south,
beyond my vision.

2. manuherikia

The wind speaks a foreign tongue
and the century and a half
we’ve been here
does not make it less strange
as it buffets the tussocks and
grows brash from the snow plateaus
a horizon away. Gold
lured the pioneers who built
st bathans, cambrians, lauder
that do not belong to this moa boned earth
dreaming reverently among its eerie geography
like the landmarks of gods.

3. whale coast

Driftwood, seawrack.
The tide lays her unreadable icons
where the beach shelves.
There are other carvings; bleached
whale vertebrae, a seabird’s
rumpled ruin
and among marram dunes
yoked to this scrubby beach
bloom sea purples.
Once a smokestack reared on the
bay and a whaler’s shed
where the bluff ends.
Now only wind roars over the
seaward mountains; seaspray mists
an obscure coast.

4. matakaea

where sealions dream. All night
a moonstruck silence, the
ocean’s cuss like a heart.
When light blinks on
offshore stacks define themselves.
Dawn’s grainy
loud with seabirds’ anger,
louder than the breakers between heads
sweeping south to tairoa
deaf with surf.
While in katiki bay the tide inscribes
her writing on perfect sand
script of crabs and cormorants,
the oldest runic hand.

5. rush

Landfall on a whaler’s coast.
Crossing gaunt hills, range after range.
In maniototo snow tussocks
rock gullies
still clatter with their barrows.
You can find rat pits,
manuka poles, sluice buckets.
Even miners’ nugget boots
and wide awake hats. In such
wilderness
the scab weed stayed longer
than their greed.

6.ocean music

From under the gold leaf patterns of land
a slow crab across the bar in our last century tug
to trawl the oyster beds. Not today or ever
shall the sea be the same who bears us
to ruapuke and the halfway rocks
where swell crackles over limpets.
This is the smelt run where reefs build,
the sealion’s lookout;
under a mist cowl rakiura
sleepwalks in another age.
When lace rain falls on the sea
we winch over our pots;
the land has gone. Only ocean music
and a southern right sounding.

7. paturoa bay

The sea’s gravelly breathing is a mile out
and the exposed mussel beds are intense
green clumps, like poison.
Infinitely slowly sandworms scribe a fine writing
the tide shall erase.
And whittle driftwood into drowned faces.
Then stalk eyes raise from the sand; blink.
One million years to create such
murderous vision.
As the crab excavates itself from burial,
hoists an appalling claw,
a slurry of seawater moves in.

Robert James Berry rob_james_berry@yahoo.co.nz

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