A Dedication For The White Seat Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

Orangi Kaupapa is cut into three strings.
The shortest – from Glenmore Avenue –
Is a ‘No Exit’.

The second is a perilous ride down
From a junction on Northland Road
‘One Way’ only.

The third is a stretch of real road
That rises towards Telegraph Hill
And the path through the pine trees.

I have conjectured that the name
Means ‘Steps to the Stars’
Or ‘An Audience with the Sky God’.

I may well be wrong.
Another interpretation is
Native Potato Gardens.

But the three snippets
Pretty well sum up
Much of life and its ups and downs.

‘Theirs the bickering lives,
Rough husbands, cotton aprons, draggled wives,
Children brief beanstalk flowers...’

‘If I move down, I strike the starlight pitch
Of houses lapping in the molten drink
Of moon beams in their gutters run to loss’.

‘Meat and drink is the moon: but if I wait
Till dawn unveils the hills, I feast my eyes
On tossing gorse and broom... and the windy skies’.

Iris, the girl who lived at 92 Northland Road
And who became ‘Robin Hyde’,
Lived a thing or two, learnt a thing or two.

How desperately sad to see her pictured
On the steps of her caravan ‘Little China’
In a bleak November in England in 1938.

She stands mid-steps, half-turning
Wearing a shapeless and hopelessly small
Quilted jacket closed with a large safety pin.

Outfitted by the Winter District Relief,
Her gaze is far-sighted in respite of the next attack,
Pain within and pain withal.

I know that feeling Iris:
‘Drawls the blue cart by the quarry:
The waggoner’s words melt into gloom’.

Would that I could have brought you home:
‘Where the hedgehogs run in the grass, with no more sound
Than will scare the sleeping skylarks, half awake them’.

So that you, back on the white seat half a mile from the top,
‘Could rest for a moment, lean over a cup of mist,
And the wrinkling harbour water curdled in moonlight.’



[For Iris Wilkinson / 'Robin Hyde': NZ Poet 1906 - 1939]