Songs from the Sea
Yesterday, New Zealand marked two minutes silence for the 29 men who died in the Pike River mine explosion, at the commencement of a memorial service on the West Coast.
Songs from the Sea was written in memory of Rod Thornton, who also lived on the West Coast and died, aged 27, in a fall while mountain climbing. Given yesterday’s sense of loss and elegy, and the strength of the West Coast environment in the poem, it felt like the “right” post for today.
Songs from the Sea
Songs from the sea sighing
in beneath the spindrift to the land’s
curve, lying long beneath green bush
where the nikau palms stand sentinel
all along that shining margin
between sea and land, where the wind
goes walking through the wild grasses
and sea birds glide, sailing the currents
of the air above shifting saltwater
tides, plaintive, melancholy, crying
to the wide and empty skies.
All their songs are sung for you,
sough of the wind and sigh of the sea
are your lullaby and your requiem
where you now lie, in the green earth
of this country you loved so well
that in your passion to embrace it
you leapt too high, like Icarus flying
into the heart of fire, into the sun –
and so fell, back into emptiness
beneath the sky, where quiet now
in earth you lie.
(c) Helen Lowe
Published in Yellow Moon 17 (Australia) 2005.
I read this aloud.. it is very beautiful and very fitting. Thank you.
Thank you, Joan. I am glad the poem “spoke” to you.