This poem was inspired by living close to the Pāuatahanui Inlet, Te Whanganui-a-Tara. The environment is rich in history and varying decades of human habitation. Remnants of early days can be seen in the landscape and buildings. Nowadays a modern suburb shuffles over the hills and continues to push inland consuming lush-green paddocks. Bird communities abound; the inlet is a busy place for all sorts of wildlife. Many tracks and walkways can be trudged, explored.  The imagination is suitably fed. 

The main purpose in writing this poem was to demonstrate how nature and humankind inter-relate and how strength of identity is gained through association with people, their history and the land. In the making of the poem, it was crucial to get the ‘feeling’ right. Imagery plays a vital part in the overall understanding. I believe the essence of the poem lives within all of us; the mythopoetic interpretation and the way we live, behave, react and deal with one another. It is my hope this poem will give readers an insight, an alternative slant on how we see our environment and the delicate relationship we have with it. I’d like to think there’s a lot the poem doesn’t say and yet much is happening, much is unspoken and much is layered between the words, the images … the silences. I’m hoping the impact is in the reading, the emergence of images and how one personally reacts to them allows access to alternative fields of creativity and folklore.

Of course, many revisions of this poem exist in many states of being crumpled and tossed. I’m not sure yet if I’ve been successful in capturing the voice within the voice, the fantasy within the fantasy. The poem is a living organism and I can’t say it is finished yet. The formatting relies heavily on the structuring of line by line, word by word and the breath pauses or intakes to make the reading effective and, in my opinion, the oral approach meaningful. Some poetry is like this … regardless of the poem on the page or what it looks like pinned to the wall for all walks of life to comment on, it can, in actual fact, be very alive and expect more changes. I believe this poem is still on a journey.

Finally, I perceive my poems to be works of art rather than artefacts, so that readers extract what they want from them; that each one becomes a personal experience, a living, breathing interpretation. And also, the next person reading a poem gets something different from the work and the next person. There is nothing unique here. We all should react in our own individual ways.

Nō reira

Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa