Poem: Stormwalker
One of a triptych of poems written for my Gethsemane station at Opawa Baptist Easter Journey 2007. The theme for the labyrinth as a whole was 'today's news'. Since climate change had burst into the headlines I wanted to do a contemplative station from the viewpoint of Earth as 'a garden under siege'; a whole-systems, God's-eye overview that invited reflection and confrontation, seeking for hope amid the shadow of approaching disaster.
Accompanying photograph: A hurricane dominates a quarter-Earth from orbit.
This poem is about a personal response to climate change in a New Zealand context. Christchurch is an exposed, swamp-built city. We inhabit an urban environment without immediate danger from weather, but there is always the shadow in the back of the mind, in the cold wet winter days, that the Canterbury river plains are a fundamentally inhospitable place to be should the water rise. On Rapaki Track just up the hills from my childhood home there is a monument to children who died of exposure when the weather turned bad. Some part of me has never quite forgotten the fear as a small child of being lost, displaced, a city kid thrown back to the elements. I wrote this as a challenge to that shadow.
Stormwalker
when the hot nor'wester
scorches tussock up Sugarloaf
I will remember you
on Olivet
when the freezing easterly
drenches Brighton Pier anglers
I will remember you
by Kinnaret
when the winter night
shades westward over Halswell
I will remember you
in Gethsemane
the storm rises
the wind whirls
the wave breaks
it will not touch me
it will not touch me
it will not touch me