Celebrating FATHERS

Meeting Ground – going an extra mile to be a dad

FOR THE 2020 Father’s Day edition, Meeting Ground presents poetry from New Zealand and Jamaica on

Portage Road stretches between two harbours.

You are here. Sun’s on the face of the deep. Small green volcanoes rise like tsunami waves. Clouds darken, rain-slicked, and unreef. A lizard ladders up a wall. A wing tip turns. An ant strives along a concrete pavement. Wind bounces through pinnacles of tall trees.

Dazzled traffic waits at lights in trapped shoals, stopped by red beneath three-masted clouds that pass fast as bows of racing schooners. Windscreen wipers fend off rain-slick blur, but it swims anyway in my green realm. Showers skip or slide over hulls of cars. Sea’s an echo sounder for Auckland’s shells.

Absolute abba abba, the sun, drowned into this world, rose, daylight before dark, to become a ship drawn by the grateful dead, of whom . . . I swallow this bitter medicine. Saltwater shawls fall. Tears, spray and foam curl gold and grey to scud as veils of wet, fatherhood. Happy Father’s Day from the curators, Ann-Margaret (Jamaica) and Shane (New Zealand). running down reflections in corroded chrome. Wraiths I pursue till sightless with my heart. Your spirit walked north across the brine – so home the sailor, the airman home for tea.

With isthmus for compass, skies are clearing, full-sail blue, like proud regatta clippers. Dolphins breach in arabesques to tumble through bubble towers lit up. Dungeon torches burn with green flames at depth. Aureoles crown absinthe’s sorrow.

From seaweed tangles I woke this morning.

Flying boat engines chatter their reverie. White terns are windswept in accelerando.

In slow formations of gulls that follow,

I trace your wake on echoes of the sea.

David Eggleton (Poet Laureate of New Zealand)

Between Two Harbours: Poem for My Father