Past things lie about like fallen leaves from some long ago summer, rustle underfoot in later years and random recollections. Why, sitting in my chair early this morning did I suddenly remember this uninvited trifle? These light-hearted lines are not serious, no , just the rustling of a few tiny leaves from a far off time when whales and we – a companion and I – all crossed paths, sadly, on an east coast beach...

    When you were nineteen
    You smoked Gauloises
    And dressed up for rebellion.
    Apostasies flowered on your tattooed skin.

    Travellers, at Mahia we stopped awhile
    From rambling's discontent,
    Waited out the rains in a cottage by the sea.
    All day long I dug fence posts
    On that high-up wind-swept ridge
    A far-off pencil sketch against the winter sky
    While you put in a garden.
    Green-fingered,
    Everything flourished where you touched.

    All night the tide murmured in our sleep.

    We floated there sometimes
    On that uneasy frontier, face down
    Where the reef fell away
    Into inky depths and darkness.
    Whales sang from the deep
    Such mystic, mournful songs
    And a pod of calves one night beached.
    The Maori wailed and brought tractors, buckets, ropes...
    Oh how we toiled and heaved in that freezing sea.
    You knelt by a huge round eye, prayed and wept.
    Our hands, heedless, were bloodied from barnacle welts.
    The listless tide rose at our beckoning,
    Then pitiless, withdrew.

    Gulls and mongrels connived
    With the indifferent falling swells.

    You bought a straw hat, noticed
    Other kinds of strandings, lamented our own.
    I joined Greenpeace, tried yoga, dreamed of whales
    With pleading eyes in my restless sleep.

       – Jogyata.

    Here, calm nurses reign
    and sagacious doctors, majestic in white
    confer and scurry about.
    Green lines track and blip across the screens
    that measure breath, groans, heartbeat,
    evidence of this, your latest resurrection.
    Outside, a pastoral scene
    meadows bursting upwards
    jubilant with spring, seed-heavy,
    fragrant with a million
    scarlet flowers, haven of finches
    and twittering, earth-bound things.
    Your own sap blooms
    through scars and crimson bandages
    and leaking rivulets, missed by errant nurses.
    A clock ticks softly
    reminding us what’s left
    and other certainties of time
    that all must pass this way and be bereft.
    Beyond the window other lives
    unfold in play
    and idle cattle stand
    then nomad clouds, a caravanserai
    in convoy voyage aimlessly across indifferent sky.
    The white sheet immaculate
    hides your grief and wounds.
    A pulse flutters briefly in your neck
    a trapped insect trying to get out.
    You lie, waiting
    inert upon the bed,
    pale Lazarus, companion-friend,
    returning from the dead.

       – Jogyata. (Source)