Coming Home

Recent visitors to the field hospital display in the 'Who Cared: Otago Nurses in WW1’ exhibition at Otago Museum were invited to write a poem in response. This is the winning entry in the 'open' section by local poet, Gay Buckingham.

With my stainless steel eyes

and penicillin breath

I think about Mum’s ‘Uncle Andy

who didn’t come home’.

Perhaps, hallucinating, he confused

the hospital’s rough hewn boards and canvas,

the Tilley lamps making shadows on sludge-grey blankets,

with the pit-sawn logs and bush tents of home.

He may have heard New Zealand vowels

in the voice talking of the southern coast he came from,

and thought it was his mother,

and he was home.

But Paschendale mud was not Southland mud.

And the boom, boom, boom he heard – unending,

was not the rolling surf of Foveaux Straight.

He probably knew he wouldn’t

come home.


(Moral rights asserted)

Gay Buckingham