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Cyclone Lusi came today and swept her mother’s soul away.
There was a morepork in my garden
hawking butterflies in the pre-storm gloom.
On these her Ides of March what auguries.
Our ancient apricot
sensing its terminal rot,
the fungal polypore,
the canker at its inner core,
set its last copious flush of fruit.
So her mother lay, branches drooping low,
her windfall progeny around her bed.
To move a tree, you wrench its roots
from their mycelial embrace.
She wrenched our hearts
with her preliminary dissociation from reality.
The strawberries in the potager had vanished.
Her mother was cataract blue wide eyed innocence.
“Did you pick the strawberries?”
“No,” she denied,
her old lips with misapplied lipstick
and a scarlet moko on her chin.
Cyclone Lusi came today and swept her mother’s soul away.
Her body mere spindrift spindle sticks,
chalk branches carried downstream by the Ngaruroro,
cast up among the driftwood heaps on Awatoto beach.
She had been deep-rooted
in the soil of Maraekakaho;
in her genealogy of the McPhees of old Tiree;
in her socialist principles – the only labour vote cast at Kereru,
the only strawberry moko in a field of cornflower blue.
Annie was not broken by life nor snapped off in the storm.
She was gently eased out of the ground.
Cyclone Lusi came today and swept her mother’s soul away
high into the vault and vortex of heaven
to drift down gently like a white feather
over the kittiwake cliffs of Ceann a Mhara.
In my garden among the wind-stripped leaves
is a fallen nest of dead fledgling chicks.
Today’s only tragedy.