From Poems for Poets by Mark Pirie

Wheatlands

(For John Kinsella)

Whether in Winter or Spring
your pen lifts against the
depression: seasonal and historic, it
soothes the capture of lands...

'Wheatlands' is a song, it runs
through fields of salt, dried over rivers -
and hidden by the trees, the notes
of parrots glinting in the light.

When I read, your song lifts,
sparks off the page,
energises with a language, both
muscular and pastoral;

it darts into the corners of
the reader's mind. Those parrots
and sheep, the images
you paint, have you to thank

for re-singing their composition -
and so simply - just by leaving
all the scenery, the memories,
the Western Wheatlands intact.

(For Stephen)

Journeying through the Rimutakas,
a day after New Year's, I'm a passenger

watching closely: the hills.
In my head, a line comes back to me from

you: 'A soap-grey slate could landslip you off
a hair-pin...' Just that. It was here a few years

back I nearly did do that; too young to
know better, taking those left-lane turns

fast. Now, today, the hills are under
mist and this is not the Mangawekas,

but there's a sense of the universal to it all,
the animism of mountains: the landscape

of death. Baxter and Campbell knew it well,
just like the trampers, the mountaineers...

I look on down to the valley floor,
and imagine a poet might well be out there now

hiding out, pitching their tent below the stars,
losing all self, out here amongst the hills.