When Daylight Comes

If you leave here in the dark, rouse yourself protesting from a warm bed, pick up a friend, head out on quiet night roads to the west, you can be at Karekare before sun-up. This is a lovely place I am often drawn to, a holy place for me that soothes the spirit – a huge canopy of sky slowly coloring in at daybreak, silver rumpled folds of sea, a long mile-wide shoreline of tidal flats, dunes, swamplands and secret lakes, paradise of wildfowl and timid animals.

Down the endless shoreline you can amble for hours, never see another human being. You feel unburdened here, immersed in eternity, a speck in this sweep of distance. You can pray to your God, sit on a sandhill and weep at your life and your memories, meditate to the seas cadences that are soft and rhythmic, beguiling. This is a place to be alone in – as of a shrine where Mother Nature is your only companion. Rough poetry that you won’t bother to polish or revisit comes easily and you scrawl lines on a piece of paper. You look at the dawn sky and talk to your Beloved without effort or guile – you are all sincerity, just yourself, babbling in the dawn at this great shrine of God.

When Daylight Comes

When daylight comes
you roam the crinkled shores
stride out to a beckoning emptiness.
Wednesday’s sun flares up
from the crook of grey hills.
Your footprints weave
the virgin wastes like an aimless drunk,
beetle across this wilderness of rumpled dunes.
The sands are a map
and last night’s other lives
have left their feeble tracks and tiny stories:
claw prints of a bittern
soft paws, a rabbit under moonlight,
stitch marks of a swift predator–
millipede, night hunter on the prowl–
the strutting bold stride of a pheasant.
And here a tiny death–
bumbling epic wanderings
of a sand beetle, ponderous
and purposeless, speared
by a beak at dawn.
Sunrise scatters golden light.
Frail thing of flesh, you lift
stick arms in supplication
captive to a sky of cirrus charms
eyes raised up
to it’s tousled random beauty.
Might some grace yet come?
Subdued by sea mists
the dawn sun stares,
a tamed red Gorgon’s eye.
You come here sometimes
comforted by seas that measure time.

    – Jogyata.