Here come the stores. Three days it takes the drover
from Timaru. With them he brings the Cornhill
and Illustrated London News. ‘How could anyone’
(my mother asks) ‘feel isolated here?
These pictures keep us abreast.’ She lets me look.
I see the late Prime Minister Palmerston’s whiskers,
Dizzy’s curls, Gladstone, the Paris Commune.
Our neighbours have a bathroom lined with pictures –
the Queen, her Windsor castle, Piccadilly.
They have American plumbing – a big bath fixed
to the floor. The water runs out through a hole.
New Zealand’s Premier is Mr Julius Vogel.
I saw him in Dunedin, sitting in a chair
in a strawberry garden. I thought him fat and greedy.
My father comes from England. Once, in Timaru,
I saw him waving his hat at a dot in the sky,
running, shouting ‘Hurrah!’. It was the first skylark
he’d seen in New Zealand. He did a cartwheel.
This morning ice from the eves has glassed the veranda.
Sunlight rainbows through. I look at the pictures
waiting for the thaw that will let us see the hills.