Nicholas Messenger has been a poet all his life, and a painter on and off. He won the Glover Poetry award in New Zealand in the 1970’s, and has had a few small one-man shows of his paintings. This year he has had poems published in Blackmail, Boloji, High Altitude Poetry, Off Course, Pulsar, Web Poetry Corner and WOW. He was born in 1945, and after completing a degree at Auckland University, travelled extensively in South America, and lived in Europe for several years. For a long time he made his living as a teacher, of science, art, and languages, in High Schools in New Zealand, where he was a long-standing member of mountain Search and Rescue organisation. Now, after nine years in Japan teaching English, he is running a small home-stay business in Hokitika, New Zealand, with his Japanese wife. He has two grown-up children from a previous marriage. Nicholas can be contacted at: nansei@farmside.co.nz

 

VITTORIA.

To take a rough idea from sketch

to blocking in the colours, there's a little ketch

we'll call Vittoria, comes back up river to Seville.

It's fifteen twenty-two. Imagine her : her hull

cracked, thick rust bleeding from between her plates.

The paint on hatch-tops bleached at the equator.

Brown weed drawn out of the swell like dyers' skeins

each time she rises out of one. The anchor chain

goes rattling down. So now she's blundered round the earth.

Her unfurled pennants and a murmurous mirth

of seagulls in her air. Across the startled shallows

red iron rooves, and hills scrub-covered, glorious with yellow

gorse in bloom. In far Cathay, that fabled land

of smokened brick in neon, and imperial contraband

of priceless art, were you not tempted to remain ?

Yes, tempted, but we carried on, remembering the main

thing was the trade in tales we'd have to tell.

You didn't lose your accent, or forget Seville ?

We tried to, boldly, as we sailed away,

but never managed. Why then, did you ever stay

so long ? You had your opportunities to turn around.

The news we bring you is, the world is round,

and on is back. And if we have at last returned

in time to talk about it, not like Marco Polo sunburned

beyond recognition and belief, then some

would say it is sufficient to have circumnavigated and come home.

 

 

VIGIL.

Vigil : it is night. There is a skyline

and a valley deep enough for a few lights to shine

like stars out of a well, and with a narrow gate

a road could find its way by with persistence

and a wind without a voice. There is a sound of fate

with soft uncertain paces or a hanging note

of distant warning, but no other evidence

that what will will, without remission, be.

The metal gathers frost as if it had a coat

of cobwebs in the moonlight's dusty glitter. All

is waiting. Like a giant bell once sounded,

still just quivering, the hours remain suspended.

 

 

HARBOUR.

How can these wild whales romp in cooee of the walls,

in full view of the windows, and within a gull-call

of the tottering look-out stations ? How can such creatures dare

come in among the wharves to dandle and make love

within the basin ? Is it because this was a city where

the sea and all her travellers welcomely arrived,

to leave their songs in the throngs of lanes and presently to shove

off for another journey ? It is true, all wanderers,

whatever coasts or oceans they have come from, find

here flotsam to remind them of their far-off homes, or wonders

to incite their further wanderings. But in the end, it was the wars

that left these waters innocently master of it all.

 

 

IN BLACK-OUT.

It was wartime then, and this was my progenitors,

at least, potentially. The couple were strolling down the centre

of a blacked-out lane, the fishing harbour at the bottom

sparkling; and a band of stars between the eaves directly overhead.

I fancy muffled sounds of living inside the cottages. I have forgotten

which particular seaside place that was, but as I said,

it was in wartime. Suddenly they were aware, but not sure how,

that past them, unseen men were gliding down

towards the boats : their faces blacked, hands gloved, and boot-soles muffled;

breaths controlled. None coughed or kicked a cobble

and no-one's weapon clanked or glinted. So my parents stifled

their endearments I suppose, and clung to one-another in the middle

of the alley, while the soldiers slipped by close against the walls.

They were on their way to where the war would be. It was, as they recalled,

like feeling phantoms sloping down to the black water’s edge.