Silberbauer Comes for Anne

After all the necessary investigations,
Interrogations, stamps on the
Relevant memorandum,
He followed the scent,

A man well trained in the art
Of ferreting out survivors,
Down the cobbled and crumbling streets
Of war-torn Amsterdam.

And he found that family,
Huddled in their tight annex,
Eking out life on the
Hemorrhaging trickle of goodwill,

Still left in the dry humps of nations,
And he was the spanner poised over the faucet.

And this was how they met death’s bureau,
Buttoned down, good-natured fellow.
Sure he tossed things around,
Hunting for clues,
Or just following standard procedure,

Lit a cigarette, flipped out his notebook
While the family were escorted away,
While he remarked to the man of the house,
My your daughter is pretty isn’t she.

And that was the long and the short of it.
He sent the pretty one off
To the emaciated pit of his awful century,
To starve on a bunk, covered in scabies.

But he’d raised the alarm,
He’d done a fine day’s work,
filed them away, a report in a cabinet,
A stamp in the relevant corner.
Soon after the war he was employed

In intelligence,
a hunter of radicals against the authorities,
A smart shirt and a tie
And a clean shaven face.

And he read that small book,
in his hours of leisure,
In which she’d gone deep
Inside her own annex
And found the horizons of herself,
In the center of a noose.

And he was the noose,
And her diary ended where he’d picked it up
And let it fall carelessly to the floor,
For it contained nothing of importance to the state.

Copyright Ricky Barrow 2014

The Colonist

Finally out of the tangle,
the stubborn undergrowth,
the dripping sky
that descended like subterfuge,
his gentle field,
laid out like a picnic,
emerged.

The forest still
reared its cold, damp mane
at his approach,
but there was something now
he had as reply.
And from the larder,
the woman,

who was no longer
young and gentle,
ferried the raw materials
he tore with calloused thumbs
from the earth
into jars, into cupboards,

sweetening, smoothing,
caramelizing the savage man
that the land was
daily tearing from him,
as if he were his fraying shirt.

She too was part of
his quarrel with the bush.
With her he’d teach it
to part its hair,
to accept the fields,
to accept the basin and the soap,
and above all the harvest.

And the forest reconciled herself
with this man,
for their treaty was neither
wholly hers or the invader’s.

And they were,
in their own ways,
immovable forces, bearing down,
hewing the other
into transformation.

Copyright Ricky Barrow 2014

Margins

There was, even in the earliest arrivals,
that element in their souls
which shrunk from the purely urban,
the pinched living,
the tripping over each other
in the dark courtyards
of old Europe,
from which they had fled.

No, here in this land,
that knew nothing
of cesspools running deep
in the nostrils and the mind,

they pushed the new cities out
to arms length or more,
and kept gardens, rolling lawns,
undies flying like flags of independence
from the line.

This wild land soon enough
de-civilized the new comers,
in the call of the mist,
and the folds of endless ranges
to the vast, un-hedged isolation.

And they grew more reticent,
lost the eloquence of the mother tongue,
steeped in its crushing epochs of speech,
lost in the thick silence,
pierced only by the tui,
a rush of wings from the bush,
untutored voices.

The forests dispossessed them,
those so-called colonizers,
but they gained in return.
On that margin between
the bach and the sea,
the mountain hut and the infinite south,
they pushed out from the pale,
the left behind, walled up centuries.

The threads tore
in the purer, turbulent skies,
while they kept the essentials,
wooley jersey, gumboots,
and tin of beef,
things to take with them
when they went off
to learn from the cataracts of the bush.

Copyright Ricky Barrow 2014

The Invasion of the Sea

At first it was just a trickle.
Like unusual shells,
the strangers,
salted by their long journeys,
washed up with the tides.

The chiefs were keen to barter
what they had,
flax, food, women,
for the trinkets, the nails, the cloth,
above all, the muskets.

And every man who counted
soon had “his” Pakeha,
an invisible fish-line
to that cold world of iron.

The chiefs, one by one,
fell to its power,
grew bold and puffed up
in the eyes of their rivals.
With their guns they had
old scores to settle,

and soon the land
was caked in the black powder
and the Maori had undergone
the first tragedy
of their long, agonizing century.

And all the while
the strangers trickled in,
with books, bread, bronchitis,
but they waded into a Maori lake,
made islands, made terms.

Then, on the shores of Te Aro,
Te Wharepouri saw with astonishment
one thousand of these strangers
step off their ships,

and called it an invasion of the sea,
the salt water people,
who would rush into
the eddies of the Maori stream,
sicken the waters
of the green stone children.

But Te Wharepouri made the most of it,
did a brisk business with the new comers,
while they eagerly took,
and stayed like a congealed tide.

Copyright Ricky Barrow 2014

The Diggers

The rush had brought the worst kinds,
drifters, crooks, half-breeds,
men without nations or loyalties.
They’d followed the migrating gold,
the elusive, fast burning phoenix,
crisscrossing the Pacific,
not giving two hoots where they landed,
whose backyard they tore up.

These men, flung together
from a dozen sinking kingdoms,
burned and froze
in the brutal streambeds of the south,
clung to their earth, their rocks,
damned all efforts
to build an orderly colony,

poured their precious stones,
once they had them,
down the gullet of the grog shop,
the whorehouse,
spoke dangerously of rough democracy,
passed their gold
to the resentful patricians
along with their dysentery,
their syphilis,
their infectious social leveling.

And the powers that be,
fearing the civil breakdown
of this happy-go-lucky frontier
of diggers, whores and Chinamen,
imported shiploads of respectable girls,
wives and helpmates,
to entice them back to the farms,
to the serious business
of building a Victorian empire.

But they stayed away
and rode the river steamers
deeper, deeper into the interior,
where they made or lost their fortunes
in the thick silt,
in the muddy streets of the ghost towns.

For they had to take pains,
to be with their loneliness
in the lonely throat of the new country,
had to tear down
the moldered shafts of the old world,
seeking new seams,
cursing, spitting, brawling
with themselves and the earth,
so that something strong,
enduring, infinite,
could be theirs.

Copyright Ricky Barrow 2014

The Snug Country

It was enough for most,
the well-tailored sleeve of a nation
pulled snug over these narrow shores.
It was a kind of satisfaction,

the well-watered gardens,
row on row,
the native ferns without the natives,
the Chinese lanterns slung from eaves,
without the Chinese,

the rounds of the Plunket nurse,
the wife on her hands and knees,
scrubbing the porch.

It was enough for most,
The triangular pen
of pub, rugby and race day,
(bets under the table made the blood rise)

the missionary position,
the starched laundry,
flags over the sacred quarter acre,
short back and sides,
the hair parted with a comb.

And if it wasn’t enough,
then there were sharp eyes,
and faces ranged like corrals,
and rumors mobilized like armies

against the dangerous question,
the irregular habit,
the un-pressed collar.

And for the very stubborn ones,
of which there were always a few,
artist types, the degraded boheme,

there were certain
more robust therapies,
in the depths of those gothic houses of joy,
guaranteed to instill the best qualities
of a well-tailored nation.

Copyright Ricky Barrow 2014

Te Puea

When she returned to her village,
a young bride of her forgotten people,
she was greeted by despair.
The light had gone out of them,
and they sat on porches,
spoke of nothing,
while the days abandoned them
for progress happening elsewhere.
The sweet honey had all gone
to feed fatter hives.

The people died of the smallest things,
a bottle of gin, a cough,
some simply fell in the rivers
and never surfaced.
And so she began her backbreaking work,
picked up the spade and the taiaha,
the shards of the land,
the fallen stories of the ancestors,
fallen from the elders’ lips when they died.

In the poverty stricken villages
of her people,
she began to speak like the old chiefs,
held huia,
dug pits for food, dug seasons,
sent the men to fell trees,
and roused the sleeping carvers.
And soon there were things unheard of,
and great festivals of waka on the rivers,
the scent of fresh carving in the
young maraes.

There was something, at last,
in the breast of her people,
which aroused like early summer.
They held the fragile broken heart
of their centuries,
passed it from palm to palm,
rubbed it, warmed it,
till it beat again of its own accord.
And they all went down
to Te Puea’s new meeting house,
committing forgotten waiata to heart,
and even the old folk got off their porches,
followed the songs home.

Copyright Ricky Barrow 2014

Japanese Shrine

Everything that surrounds it
has advanced and decayed
time and again
in waves of returning grain,

while this copse,
like a primordial cairn,
remains unchanged,
only brushed cleaner
by the moss and the wind.

And deep in its recesses
the ancient insects have gathered
to make their silent music,
true silence,

the shrill of a cicada,
the pained cry of a cricket,
sounds that plunge depths into you.

The path has already
grasped your hand,
and leads you past
the wilting stone guardians
and green rice fields,

perspiring their rich, humid summer,
the shards of terracotta tiles
at the garden’s edge,
past these things you know already.

But in there,
under the spiders’ webs,
tangle of branches,

and thicker web of leaves
that sheath the light,
that return you to the scabbard,
everything fails, everything retreats.

What was once a human voice,
an aero plane humming overhead,
plunges, suffocates
in the abiding dark.

What is the outer world
to you who glimpse,
through the dim particles
of dust and insects,

the god in his bare hold,
who doesn’t speak,
who listens
like a sealed pool in a stone urn,
who listens.

Copyright Ricky Barrow 2014