Poem

Letter to Bruce Mason 
— Gary McCormick.

Dear Bruce, your letter finds me to the South,
Two months into a mild winter.
The news you bring of Madam Cancer
Makes me want to shake.
It is an injustice I cannot reconcile.
As if birds without wings
Were born to fly
Or children left to stumble without limbs.

It is difficult to contemplate a God
Who strikes so ruthlessly
As the best.
His is a queer sense of humour
And if He were man like you or me
—If you'll excuse for a moment, the blasphemy,
We'd quarrel in a bar.
And I'd be bound, thinking of you
To kick him in the balls.
Before leave, as he lay there heaving,
To drop into his hand
A copy of your plays.

But then, amongst those we know
There is a distinct mortality.
A disposition to injury.
Old Baxter with his heart worn to a walnut
And Sam, whom people call
A melancholy drunk
Alastair with his smile of tears
And Denis stumbling in the Wellington sun.
These, and Hone with his gut sewn up
Of all who walk these islands,
Are the ones that I admire.

My letter to you, then
Is in the kindest sense, a letter to all.
Those who have worked alone, as you have done.
I have in my mind's eye
A picture of you in the hills somewhere
Back-bent and toiling.
A fencer in the back-lit sun.
Where this picture ends I cannot tell.
It is in your solitary toiling
And your hawk's eye.
The distances you travel still.

~o~

People mentioned...

Bruce Mason (1921-1982)
James K. Baxter (1926-1972)
Sam Hunt (1946 -).
Alastair Campbell (1925-2009).
Denis Glover (1912-1980).
Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008)
Gary McCormick (1951-)

The poem was first published in Scarlet Letters (Gisborne: Piano Publishing, 1980).