From Six Great Barrier Elegies: 1. To The Pakeha Poem by Rob Dyer

We have all at least once, somewhere else,
died: bloodless, uncertain, wanderers,
awaiting the judgment of motives -
no, not of deeds - they were judged, also elsewhere -
but why.

Some came to grovel for copper and gold,
scattering the bones of the native dead.
They fell to the curses of tapu, died poor,
shot themselves in the Auckland Club,
or walked off into the mountains alone, became learners,
while the copper burned the hold timbers,
the goldships sank, dazzling the puzzled hapuku.

Others brought grass, sheep, rabbits and gorse,
laying out Cotswold estates: Bampton, King's Mead,
on Pataua, Kaikoura, Ruahine, Manaia...
burning the bush, topdressing the sacred peaks.
Their soil washed down in the summer rains;
only the gorse and the rabbits settled the farms;
the titles were left, the bank took them in the end,
and the barren clay baked and powdered away.
Did any learn our secret cycle of trees in time,
searching the deep earth to replenish its loss?

Some cut the kauri for sailing spars, home beams,
were surprised they would not grow on demand,
so planted the pine, last owner of sterile lands
before dustbowl or tundra prevails.
Oh, they the bringers of death, Death's desert, despair!
where could they turn from damnation?

Or the procession of learners, my people:
Heaphy's survey of mountains for sale, despite of owner,
museum-musty Cheeseman swept by the Alpine gales,
Elsdon Best prying jumbled tales of savage minds,
condemned the data for their will to change,
longed for Eden, place of understanding good and bad,
here beneath the Southern Cross, as long foretold.
I see them all now, circling the pa-paths
on Sugarloaf, before the angel with the flaming sword.

Gentle Dante, were none to see Beatrice?
All damned? Or held else forever in Purgatory? Yours?
********************************************
No, some saw her, left Vergil, followed her star:

Reverend Kendall, his sermons abed, praying
the brown sweating thighs to give them responsion
(Lavinia may be stolen from Turnus by war, be given,
but the Treaty's not signed till she come freely) ,
was banished by pomp and hypocrisy, clear of the stain.

Young Rex Fairburn, stumbling on the cave
tapu to ancestors even older than his,
knew at once that only the sacred act of love
within that place could make him pure.

Baxter, drunk or sober with his slingful of words,
sang psalms in Jerusalem, was forgiven Bathsheba.

Bullmore saw late the hills of his carnal home
as the place of caress, the earth he had mounted,
the channels of birth, the exuberant breasts.

Lowry, his great heart open to lovers, traitors and poets,
all who were famished in the seven lean years,
took his gun, told them to bury him so deep
he might be a great tree in the coming desert,
a kahikatea or a matai for the little birds, the
whispering angels falling as leaves upon the soil.

Even in Aotea, for us too, remembering their story,
she can come, Beatrice,
suddenly.