You started it all. Here for you it ended.
Here it goes on. A bridge over Grafton Gully
casts morning shadow. A motorway shaves the graveyard
and crops it back. Through oaks and undergrowth
the interrupted light on broken gravestones
writes and erases itself. Further down
was once a stream. Sometimes a former someone,
drunk, derelict, or dead by misadventure,
was found there. It was our forest in the city
with paths and dangers – most of it now cut down.
Immemorial aunts, great uncles, cousins
I’m told are here. A still decipherable headstone
remembers my forebear who walked behind your coffin
and five years later joined you under the oaks.
Your children went back to England. We remained
to inherit your city and that distrusted Treaty
you made as instructed by those who would later call it
‘little more than a legal fiction’. Your dearest Liz
took home her title to two hundred Auckland acres,
prospered, a widow in Plymouth, and didn’t remarry.
Shadow pickets fall on the raised white slab
that marks your grave. A Caribbean pirate
once put a noose to your neck, then changed his mind
and set you adrift without sail. You lived to die
at a desk in a dream of Auckland, clouded by
headaches that came from the south. A riderless horse
was led behind the coffin eight sailors carried.
All day the tribes lamented. ‘Send us no boy,’
a Chief wrote to the Queen, ‘nor one puffed up,
but a good man as this Governor who has died.’
‘Remote,’ they called it; ‘lacking natural advantage.’
That you chose the Waitemata, that your choice attracted
artisans from the south, that from this site
you asserted your right to govern – these were facts
the Wakefields wouldn’t forgive. ‘It is not my purpose,’
you wrote, ‘that I should disparage Port Nicholson,
but only, against deceptions, to say that I find
here a more genial climate, more fertile soil.’
No people chooses its history. Doubting our own,
we can say at least in this we know you were right.
Our chopper-cops go over eyeing Auckland.
From a car radio a voice I’m sure belongs
to Kiri te Kanawa skies itself through branches
with ‘Let the Bright Seraphim …’ Under the bridge
Maori street kids have tuned their ghetto-blaster
to Bobby Brown. A boy sniffs glue from a bag
beneath his jacket. Messages on the arch
in well-schooled spray-can read ‘King Cobras Rule’
and ‘The Treaty is a Fraud’. Governor, all about you
for better and worse, your memorial goes on growing.
Last night, yellow as butter, an outsize moon
sailed over the ridge of Parnell. In Emily Place
it picked the obelisk out that marks the place
where you laid the first stone for the first St Paul’s;
it gilded the six-lane highway, once a track,
where you used to lead your Lila and her schoolfriend
Harriet Preece, and lift them over the ditch;
it laid a lily of light on ‘this beautiful spot
on the slope of a wooded valley looking to the sea,’
once yours and, given to the city, yours again.
Let today be all the days we’ve lived in New Zealand:
stench of whale meat, a rat cooked on a spit,
morning boots frozen hard, the southern Maori
ravaged by measles, rum, Te Rauparaha;
wars in the north, gumfields, forests falling
to ruminant grassland, cities climbing like trees;
and everywhere this language both supple and strong.
You didn’t start it, Governor. As we do, you fashioned
what time, and the times that live in us, required.
It doesn’t finish. These verses have no end.