Michael Walker

I know, or I think I know, where I was born.
New Plymouth, a city with two sprawling cemeteries,
where I found my grandparents' gravestones at last,
but they were covered in gray lichen and moss.
...

I can see your boarding house now,
A spacious, two-storied bungalow
That overlooked the blue-water harbour.
Your rambling house had good prospects.
...

Peter Snell was an unknown athlete
when he won the 800 metres gold medal
at the 1960 Rome Olympics, lunging at the tape
to just shade Roger Moens on the line.
...

I played goalkeeper.
I coached high school soccer teams:
I lost interest.
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I worked so long in the shadow of Bob Menzies,
that I was surprised when he did step down.
After a caucus vote, I stepped up to become
the seventeenth Prime Minister of Australia.
...

Good manners sail on the Gulf Streamof mutual satisfaction:
Bad manners sail in the Southern Ocean of cold indifference.
If most people are well-mannered, all of society benefits.
After getting called out for yawning and not listening
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It was my first experience of hard labour,
working in the green fields under the sun,
on a long working holiday near Motueka.
...

My city used to have video rental shops
dotted around the suburbs of escapism,
though for some time there has been just one,
which closed its doors last week.
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('Make a tree sound and its fruit will be sound; ...For the tree can be told by its fruit'. N.T. Matt.12: 33) .

The lemon tree still stands alone outside my bedroom
In a level weedless plot where it flourishes modestly
...

1

En me promenant en bas de la Rue Princes
Avec de la glace et personne, je comprends
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'School days are the best days of your life.`
I have heard that said so often, but I disagree.
Adult life was much more attractive for me.
Memories of childhood and adolescence are happy, though.
...

Alma Road slopes slightly downhill,
which makes it an ideal place to start
a run in the morning, a spring in my step.
I notice Spriggens Park, which is now
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The great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong opened
for the Beatles at the Auckland Town Hall
in 1964, on a double bill, I sat behind the stage.
Looking like four brothers, the Beatles entered.
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Ils ont enleve la robe de lin du corps de la terre
Decouvrant ces membres-la et ces cuisses foux et timides

Pas de l'amour, mais afin de
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I was the only boarder in an old villa
out at Island Bay, near the beach
where I took long walks on The Esplanade.
The house was near the bus stop on The Parade.
...

The nights are longer and darker in August
even though the shortest day was six weeks ago.
The night feels right for thinking and writing
and I concentrate on draft after draft before the final version.
...

Reinhold Messner, an Italian, has had more highs
than any other mountain climber, having reached the top first
of all the world's 8000 metre-plus peaks in the Himalayas and
the Karakoram.
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I have seen lions and tigers in zoos,
Looking fierce. Who would be a lion tamer?
I have seen leopards streaking across the veldts
Of South Africa chasing prey until the end-game.
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The sun is low in the western sky this evening
on my jog beside the river in the heat.
The water isrippling blue with wavelets
on the incomimg tide: it is like a painting to me.
...

It must be fifty years since I last rode a bicycle
but this morning I did ride a ten-speed Apollo
around the flat straight streets of my city.
I felt wobbly to begin with and overbalanced
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