Tolaga Bay
And the patient sea....
The East Cape of Aotearoa (New Zealand) is a wild place of steep hills, dense forest and small pockets of land cleared for the grazing of sheep and cattle, where the topography allows.
The first people to come here - the Polynesian Maori - named the hills and the rivers, the beaches and the bays, and made a life here. The later European arrivals have struggled to do so. There are no good natural harbours, and even today the roads are narrow, torturous and slow.
At Tolaga Bay the local farmers built an enormous pier a century ago, out through the shallow water, to allow direct shipping of what they produced - meat and wool - and easier freight for all the things they needed, which was pretty much everything.
The first ship came in 1929. The last in 1966.
Now the Bay sleeps, in between storms, and a visitor can drive those slow twisting roads, walk out over the water, and wonder at how the Maori ever got here, across the vast Pacific, with nothing but large canoes.
Down at Tolaga the old pier -
knee deep in ocean - awaits
dissolution, outlasting
its own history,
but today the sea
sleeps; waves slap
slow time with
each breath.
This is liquid,
finding its own
level, lying almost
flat beside the land.
Just a gentle pat
of swell against
steep cliffs of soft
and barely stone;
Pale substance looking
strong, impregnable
against a blue sky but
crumbling at a touch.
This is such a temporary landscape -
ocean eaten with each storm. Only
our own brevity makes it seem permanent;
we are here for an instant - barely.
All night we hear the waves
outside speaking with the stars.
At dawn they summon clouds,
wind. Dawn comes. Day begins.
We pack, load the car, watch the waves
and as we leave the sea awakes -
foam tipped, white flecked.
All things have an end.







A beautiful meditation on place. I loved the added photos to help paint the picture!
Your words are so wonderful, the photos are almost unnecessary. But then , you often do something out of the ordinary with the photos too, and that brings everything together most beautifully. Thanks for sharing.