Christchurch, September 2010.
1
Checking in at Warnerıs 'Heritage' Hotel
next to the Cathedral,
we asked the receptionist:
when will the cathedral bells stop ringing?
Oh, she said, before midnight.
We think theyıre training a new hunchback.
2
The statue of straight-backed Captain Scott
stands by the little River Avon
(you can punt near central Christchurch)
looking just like its picture
in the NZ School Journal,
circa 1948.
Those days - country school - to and fro
we trudged with winter chilblains.
I do not regret this journey...ı
Yet someone had blundered - Amundsen and Co
got to the Pole and back, we were told.
But we were British and kind to animals.
Such clean deaths. (That was all pre-1914.)
Our Uncle Jim - now he, we knew,
had gone to France and back.
Not that he ever mentioned it to us.
It was his fellow soldiers who
'made the supreme sacrificeı.
Cousin Sam in the next war went
all the way to Berlin and back.
They did not regret their journeys.
I see the sculptor was Scottıs widow.
To my eye his face is out of focus,
snow costume unheroically shapeless,
a snow man blindly fixed in white stone.
Max Richards
now back in Melbourne
[in Christchurch three days before their big 'quake,
to be reported on...]
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