Patricia Prime


Disuse

before the ferry
crosses the harbour
the volcanic island’s
twin peaks
tipped with cloud

Years ago we holidayed on Rangitoto (sky father/earth mother) with our children. Many of the baches were uninhabited during the winter months, no families to dig the gardens between plump exotics - white hanging bells of datura among ponga and pittosporum, azalea beside flax. But in the summer the volcano was active with holiday-makers.

Check-shirted men with fishing rods walked with an absorbed pace down to the rocks, clump-clumping in waders. Tourists clambered to the summit and parents on the beach stretched beneath sun umbrellas while their children played in the water.

Once the holiday homes were black-paned and irregular on the green hillside spotted with crimson pohutukawa and Norfolk pines, macrocarpa and nikau palms. A tangle of honeysuckle over kanuka, bleached scrub, fibrolite falling beneath spider's webs, pilings crumbling into the sea . . . and nothing else.

beside
an overturned
picnic table
a stack
of beached canoes

between green blades
and wind-swept sand
six-pack rings
and the remains
of a bonfire

sun and rain
in equal quantities
a double rainbow
crosses from city
to island

Copyright © 2008 Patricia Prime

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