Invasion Road

In Balclutha the river moils,
alive with three rivers’ soils,
before a taniwha traps all in her coils.
The clean fleece of tourists
is knitted into many baby blankets.
Manes of waves move beyond the toetoe.
Wind bluster punishes the shining tussock.
A roll of thunder claps at
the unfolding scarf of a waterfall,
and echoes tremble in tūīs’ call,
in twang of fence-wire, in patter of hail.
When you are shouted at
for speaking te reo Māori in public,
fretful sleepers turn to their medicine,
while earth rumbles and coughs up stones.
From steam hiss advance children of mist,
and the bishop claims this poem
has nothing to say to him, this poem
carries no weight down Invasion Road.
Coal and timber orient to the meridian,
while turquoise and cerulean lift to the sky,
as bolt after bolt of white cloud folds away,
tiny miracles of violets coming through leaf mould.
There’s a stripping to extreme language,
where heritage contends with fast-track approval,
and so it begins with an ending,
amongst salvaged landscapes,
as cameras pan the silts of the riverbed
for signs of gorse dross, kōwhai in flower.
An ambivalence emerges dazzled from a gully
to wait at the bottom of a cliff, crumbling
where an open-cast mine may come to pass,
and things unattempted may yet tempt us
to abandon the scenery, to take to ways of the city.
The truth arrives in masquerade, having left
the council decision process in a huff.
The huff turns to puff, and what we said of it,
I suppose, became part of what it is,
a remembrance of past exploits and old ills,
of the book of myths in which we did not appear.
I hear my thwarted spirit sob in tune with the choir,
and the rest is helicopter prop-wash, car alarms
triggered, but who will right the balance,
who will promise revenge for those wrongs?
All I have is a fingerprint on the pad
to undo the dotted line of my phone,
that signs away the time on my behalf,
but still we are part of the dream of freedom,
the lay of the land is at our boot-shod feet,
the world resounds to a dawn chorus of what-ifs,
and so, rights and wrongs ride back home together,
joined at hip and shoulder in the back of the ute.
In the midst of life, we cycle into Ranfurly,
where the breeze pelts us with buckets
of daffodil blooms at five dollars each.

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David Eggleton’s The Wilder Years: Selected Poems (2021) and Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019–2022 (2023) are from Otago University Press. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. Lifting the Island: Poems was published by Red Hen Press in Los Angeles in September 2025.