homesick

Sometimes I really miss NZ, especially when it's so cold and dark.

Here's a poem:

New Zealand/Aotearoa

Are you my home?
Your wide clear day
showing up for bright green the grass
and for corrugated the fence
beside the field where children play.
Are you my home?
small square veined town
tarmac oozing in summer sun
blaring with pied piper ice cream vans.
Your valleys are cloaked in mysteries
of somber green
ornamented with hidden birds
darkly singing to the fathomless sky.
Your fields are flecked with wooley backed
land-maggots
clinging with all four feet
ceaselessly gnawing
at your outsides.
Your hills
lie stark and trembling
lashed to the bone
and waiting to be washed away
in the merciless rain.
No gentle beauty
No faded grandeur,
a narrow lock of land
hemmed by great sweeps of grey
fumbled relentlessly by the hands of the southern seas
scattered with the black bones of bonfires
you do not welcome me softly
with your too-cold wind
and your too-fierce sun
the thorn of your wildness snapped in my hand long ago
and I have left it there
a dark mark under my skin
so I wait
to feel your soil under my bare feet
for your wind to toss my hair into my face
for my heart to rise gleaming
like the tui
to the kowahi tree
and to speak
I am home again.