Wellington's Safe Harbour Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

Brought together at lunchtime in Unity
there is a kindly bonhomie of Kiwi poets
celebrating Wellington and the creative
life that it inspires with its Big Weather:
voices that have been moved to ‘record
their responses to the steep streets and myriad people,
the food and political energy, the cable car and cenotaphs,
the wharves' - and the winds that can leave you hanging!

‘I want to make people feel, cry out - for poetry
to be a dagger brought to bone', she says in tears
‘for it to eviscerate the ordinary - for it to be real',
she who was brought to this city from civil war:
"I was eight years old when they built the port in Novi.
At that age most children know how to swim — I didn't know how yet.
While playing about the harbour I fell into the sea.
I sank.

The water buoyed me up.
I saw the children above me on the wall
— I extended my hands — tried to shout, — I couldn't!
I was swallowing sea water, — I was sinking — I was lost!
In that instant I flew through my entire life.
All the sins of my young life appeared again before me:
I was stealing sugar, I was beating my brother,
I was lying, I was climbing the fruit tree

— My last thought was: "I was descending into Hell! "
— and I lost consciousness.
They got me out — and for what? "
It is not as though this doesn't happen here -
last year a young man in his cups and overbold,
revelling late at night on the harbourside promenade,
climbed the iron lattice of our ancient floating crane the Hikitia
dropped down and failed to surface.