Climb the Limbs Like a Ladder

What's left of a once beautiful blue spruce.
We would climb the limbs like a ladder
and get on to the roof.
A great place to hide
and lay in wait during BB gun fights!!!

Photography by Aaron B. Carriker
Thanks to Clive James and Marguerite Chapman, I learned a new poem today and could not help thinking of these photographs that my brother Aaron took a few years ago. His captions read so nostalgically, they could well be lines straight from Hone Tuwhare's poetry!

Friend
Do you remember
that wild stretch of land
with the lone tree guarding the point
from the sharp-tongued sea?

The fort we built out of branches
wrenched from the tree
is dead wood now.
The air that was thick with the whirr of
toetoe spear succumbs at last to the grey gull's wheel.

Oyster-studded roots
of the mangrove yield no finer feast
of silver-bellied eels, and sea-snails
cooked in a rusty can.

Allow me to mend the broken ends
of shared days:
but I wanted to say
that the tree we climbed
that gave food and drink
to youthful dreams, is no more.
Pursed to the lips her fine-edged
leaves made whistle - now stamp
no silken tracery on the cracked
clay floor.

Friend,
in this drear
dreamless time I clasp
your hand if only to reassure
that all our jewelled fantasies were
real and wore splendid rags.

Perhaps the tree
will strike fresh roots again:
give soothing shade to a hurt and
troubled world.

by Hone Tuwhare, 1922 - 2008
New Zealand Maori Poet

Aaron writes:
I was more than a little surprised to
see that the pond still has water in it.
Really nasty water, but it's still holding water . . .

For more nostalgia
from Aaron, Hone, Marguerite, and others,
see my Fortnightly post: "Broken & Beautiful"