Poem - Ocean Music by Robert James Berry

Ocean Music

by Robert James Berry

1. South Otago Coast

Below inch-high 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,
sea purples bloom.

Once a smokestack rose up 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:

crab and cormorant scripts,
the oldest runic hand.

5. Rush

Landfall on a whaler’s coast.
Crossing gaunt hills, range after range.

In Maniototo snow tussocks
and 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 tug crawls across the bar

to trawl oyster beds. Not today or ever
shall the sea be the same, which 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 cowl of mist 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 whale 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 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 was born in the UK and now lives in Auckland, New Zealand. He's been published widely and his first volume, Smoke, appeared in 2000.