Overview
This poem, recorded on 15 March 2014, is part of the Walk with Me: McCahon Series of events at Te Papa. Colin McCahon is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated artists. His sweeping multi-canvas work Walk (Series C) (1973) is, in part, an imagined walk along Muriwai beach with the New Zealand poet James K Baxter. Te Papa invited poet, artist, and curator Gregory O’Brien to select eight poets to write poems inspired by McCahon’s work: Bill Manhire, Dinah Hawken, Hinemoana Baker, Ashleigh Young, James Brown, Vincent O'Sullivan, John Pule, and Paula Green.
Tidal
One day I had the fleeting thought
I could give myself over
to rising and falling
- in all its tempos and variations.
The next day I had the fleeting
thought that rising and falling
were what I was after,
what I had been waiting for and
swimming in all the way along.
The third day was a day of miracles:
the sun came out, the sea settled
and the pohutukawa learnt to flower.
On the fourth day I came home
with an armful of clouds
and they were good for me.
The sea next day had a dirty edge. Even so
further out a brilliant colour was coming
back into its massive body.
On the sixth day I saw the horizon
and on it the softened peaks of a land
that cannot be named.
You know what happened after that:
a breather - full-bodied, on sand - a pause
in which the thought of rising in time appeared.
© Dinah Hawken