Overview
Listen to Bill Manhire reading 'Colin'
This poem, recorded on 15 March 2014, was read as 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.
Colin
McCahon said jump
and now we all
jump, sort of,
sometimes, anyway
look, it’s hard
to lift
when you haven’t
got the energy
nor the musculature
nor the gift,
it takes a pack
of courage
to shift
the Mustang in the drive
the one with
the painting in it
with the man
jumping over onions
each onion a file
of fine lines
across the face
of the man
who stares at the canvas
and really can’t resist
*
and the further the eyes
jump, Colin
told me, the firmer
the feet
on the ground:
Muriwai, 1969
(big tidal sound)
we felt shellfish rising
from beneath
our feet. We were their
sky and they
our firmament.
No one was
going by
which I think
gave Colin
much of his advantage
*
which leaves, I suppose
the Norfolk pine
3 kids calling
50 feet high
as if they could
touch the sky
as if the ocean
were their father
as if they
would rather
*
sit on
the empty
beach
write ‘walk
with me’
then vanish
into the aloneness:
oh that feels
fairly
solitary all right
that feels like
the dark landscape
& the horizon
we have heard of
& the light.
© Bill Manhire
‘Colin’ was originally published in Bill Manhire’s book What to Call Your Child (Godwit, 1999)