Winner of the published poets section of the 2021 Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature Robert Burns Poetry Competition

Uisge

The long way home is the way of water.
My family folds up across oceans;
blood stories, these journeys, end to end of the century.
Here day, there night. Raining in both.

My childhood is built on a floodplain;
my inheritance its draining, an emptiness of trees,
the first glint of ocean from the Hurunui road,
pale hands on kawakawa stone.

Before glaciers laid out the Canterbury Plains,
people lived on the Clyde.The water braided into the Rakaia
has a name older than itself. My name,
and my brother’s, hold the same distance.

I am following the river home. I am going home.
This new old place will be a home. There is an always home,
there must be an always home—
I think the digging out of a home—

I pack my books, my beat-up boots, my toki.
I hope this old Clyde will see through
me to my grandfather, this old name.
I hope the awa will remember me.

I fold away the birds, my breath,
the mānuka beneath the elm,
the light dripping down the peninsula,
the patch-stripped hills,
the pewter sky, the aching sea.