From Six Great Barrier Elegies: 2. The Grey Mare Poem by Rob Dyer

Once in our clematis days your hooflets trampled tamariki-a-Tane:
rimu, totara, miro, ti, kahikatea, nikau,
startling the tui from the kowhai, the ruru in the kauri.
Then the settler's wife, lingering in the tin privy after tea,
called you Celeste, a fantasy of starlight in the twilight bush.

Now you are worn, as she, used by the steep slopes.
You have hauled away the bush as logs,
wrenched away the stumps for your shouting masters,
spread phosphates for the unacclimatised grass,
herded the senseless sheep to British markets.
Tane no longer comes here, the ruru or tui,
only the settlers' children, seeing land as currency.
It is too late for kindness to cherish this land or you.
You have felt the beat of your riders, know
they never settled these temporary places:
Tryphena, Oroville, Fitzroy, Claris.
Shocked you rear from the gentling touch,
distrustful as of a calm day on the eroded slopes.
It too will pass, and the sharp wind and rain return
to scratch the topsoil away, like a tiger clawing
his prey, a greedy farmer lashing his beast.
You are proud you have broken this virgin soil;
unpitied and without pity, the land is your product.
And yet you wait, as layer by layer the loam is used,
for the bones of the buried rock to surface,
red and useless to those who profit from your land.

One day in the cicada summer, when the last settler has gone,
and the wind loosens the pitiless clay, your sister,
Papa-tu-a-nuku will take you back to herself,
weary of bearing from the dark those lovers
who for bankers on Queen Street wrought this ruin.
You will rise, your old bones aching,
and dance again the wave-swept swirl of your freedom,
galloping, galloping on, till the grey hide blends
in the eddies of red dust, and longed-for silence
buries your heart in the arid island hills,
the lover who never spoke within the beloved land.