Tag: swimming

At Mita Bay

Let’s be harum scarum hillbillies
forever and a day
We’ll be runaway hippies hiding out by the shore
We’ll surface in the morning
in the glow of a watermelon tent
beside the silken sea

Chuckly choclatey ducks will putter in and out, stealing our chips
and icecream kereru will loom on leafy branches –
French vanilla and blueberry

Peter will rattle about after runs
making cups of tea in bed
and when we feel like it
we’ll sleep like mars bars under stars

Kids  can tear around yelling
and waving their sticks
Or nesting like birds and wetas
in the crooks of old trees

Our chairs will be logs
and our table a stump
but lollipop lilos we’ll have for our beds
so our dreams will be soft and loftily luscious
Lullabies we’ll have of ruru echoing
and wake up to tui and magpie chortling

When the sun hits the tent and we’ve dozily read a chapter or two
We’ll run straight from our sleeping bags and dive like dusky dolphins
into the silken sea

 

Skinny Dipping in the Heaphy River

Wading out of the irk of endless chatter
Escaping nutrition advice and gear talk into the salty air
I step down white bookshelves of sand,
grainy as parchment – creamy as snow

I pass driftwood scarecrows and gnomes,
the pre-historic beak of a dinosaur bird
and taniwha with following eyes.
In the soft moth-light of late summer dusk
I walk into the sea-change
There’s a subversive prickle of risk,
illicit delight and fear of discovery –
Beware the fearsome nipping sandflies and the clothes collecting swoop of current…
No hesitation – gasp

Oh but it’s delicious! like cold whipped cream
pillow slip soft and pure as a magic flute
I’m dissolving!
The candour of clear water!
How far down into Earth does the river seep?
breathing as the pale earth breathes –
She sends the mist of the day’s end
from mountains out to sea –
cool calm resurges and peace
singing the lunacy of tides in witch-light
and turning the birds egg stones –
I share the space with a solitary shag,
dipping like a teapot –

Memories surface of other swims and swoosh together,
imagination sinks through sand to other swimmers
in other times and seas and waves
Solitary solace wells into togetherness
sliding into the universe
Surrendering weight, surrendering separation,
like a temporary death,
brimming with the fulness of the tide –
and then to bed!