Nazomi

For another David

Some of you will know that I have a passion for climbing, and for mountains, and for outdoor adventure generally, but this poem is not about me. Many years ago I knew a woman who who had recently lost her much loved Brother - who shared my name - in a fall from the peak of Nazomi in the Aoraki region of New Zealand's Southern Alps.

Climbing unroped, as is sometimes necessary for speed, David slipped, and fell, and his body was taken by a crevasse in a high ice field and never found. Some years later I was climbing there myself, and thinking of that other David, whom I never had the chance to meet, and I wrote the poem below.

For anyone with an eagle eye for mountains - these photos are my own, and they were taken in New Zealand, but they are not actually images of Nazomi or of Aoraki. I do have some, somewhere, or I did, but time, time, time rearranges all things, and some things become lost. Photos... people too. What we keep is memory, while we can.

Nazomi:

A blue structure of sky

is built upon the mountain;

rock and snow and ice

the foundation

for scattered ribs of cloud

and the day which billows above,

like a loose tent snapping in the wind.

Aoraki is the ridgepole.

The peak of Nazomi is hammered on

with yellow stakes of sun,

but the carpenters have gone,

the job half done.

So at dusk the day

will flap itself to rags

till the stars shine through,

and the night will come,

and tomorrow something new.

And you will always be there,

in the high neve somewhere where you fell,

safe in the mountain’s lap,

with your hammer and nails,

and your frosted face,

and the rope still coiled in your pack.