Peter Pan and the Sword of Damocles

A short gulf flight links

the island whenua which feeds my youth

to an urban burden of care.

In a day, the harvest of twenty years

is shared with the needs of twenty patients

holding parts of broken stories,

hearing unspoken fears,

engaged through senses subjective as weather,

and I offer an uncertain science

distilled with what skill, what wisdom there is,

knowing a thousand grateful patients

cannot avert that one dread complaint.

There are slips, there will always be slips

and the hawk circles and waits.

The gulf is crossed

by a short flight

and the masks are switched.

I always lose my head on the Barrier,

the wild fickle coast enticing me

with exuberant promise.

A life jacket is all the wisdom needed

here, crashing my ocean kayak

out through the waves, the exhilaration

of the ride rising above the memory

of the last dumping.

Climbing the crumbling clay headland,

choosing exposed pōhutukawa roots

over the worn track, savouring small dangers

and habitually revisiting old predicaments,

what do I hope to prove?

A Peter Pan of petty adventure,

I pull a defiant cap over white hair,

but here there must be no slip

to the black rocks that wait below.

A short gulf flight

takes me back once more to the land

of patients, employees and care.

Into the void

With both parents lost,

remembered, buried, nothing

stands between being here

and the edge of not being;

the incline to the unfenced cliff,

the pull of the current

to the cataract.

There were warning signs

of course, but in this time-kept world

there is no pause, no rewind,

and where we once saw

the parent interposed

now there is a clear-felled

view into the void.

Communion

While I weed and potter

a jovial thrush keeps up a prolonged dissertation

on a conversational note, with inflexion

reminiscent of a day in France

when a local woman of relatable age

in the queue at the gare, engaged

me in earnest discourse

while I ouied and nodded

and ouied and smiled as you do

and ouied and mirrored her mood

and ouied over a rising urge to burst

into laughter, until her tone

and repetition conveyed

that a reply was expected;

so I confessed in my own tongue

that I was another ignorant foreigner,

tested my je ne comprends pas,

and detached myself as she turned away

in what may have been disgust or pity

or embarrassment.

My thrush makes no demands,

content to have an audience

or so I presume.