Beacon Fire
By CAROLYN MCCURDIE
An image has snagged itself in my mind. It is making demands of me.
A night sky. Stars. Against these, the dark presence of the hill
you and I have known all our lives. From early morning we've been carrying wood
to the top. And all day, as we picked splinters from our palms,
we have watched another hill along the coast where the land curves
into the unknown.
Is this memory? A fragment of ancestor still in the blood?
Then, just as we think about sleep, that hill flings fire
to the sky, and there's shouting. We have prepared the torch.
Our own beacon fire stutters then opens its throat. For a moment
we stare at our hill. We have never seen it so urgent. A repeating,
repeating of hills, but we're too busy to look. Children, still curled
with sleep, are blanket-bundled into carts to send them away
from the coast. Most of the food goes with them.
Is it something I've read? A novel? A history?
So we are left, the grown-ups. We pace, we sharpen, we wait. Then the moment
we stand, walk out to face the thunderous on-coming.
I'm aware of your shoulder. I hear your attempt to calm your breathing. I try
to calm mine, and fail. But there are so many of us, so many of us.
Or could this be from the future?
There will be a child. One of ours. Her voice swept back
by storm, by rising seas, does she use mind, splinter, fire,
to cry out?
- Dunedin poet Carolyn McCurdie won the 2013 NZ Poetry Society International Competition with Making up the Spare Beds for the Brothers Grimm.
• Contributions to this weekly column are invited from writers south of the Waitaki River, should be previously unpublished, should not exceed 35 lines and should be in typed or emailed text - do not send attachments. There will be no correspondence over selections. Post to Opinion Page, Editorial Department, Otago Daily Times, PO Box 181, Dunedin; or email to philip.somerville@odt.co.nz
