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.