Email Poem

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Poem

They called you Grandma - 
                   matriarch of Taiaroa Head. 
Your husband of seventeen years, 
 Blue-Green,
 named after the colours of the bands 
        they placed around his leg.
For over sixty years you 
              returned to this windswept 
              piece of Otago coast to breed. 
The surrounding sea 
             a golden harvest of fish 
into which time and time again 
you dove at sickening breakneck speed.

On clifftop nest your last chick, 
                       Button, crying to be fed. 
You fished your heart out on
 ocean voyage yet
         he not yet fledged lost weight,
but forever present the keen eye 
         and caring hands of Shirley Webb.
Most of your life was spent at sea -
           a radius of continents - 
                        Chatham Islands, 
The Sisters, Hello friends!
               As always gliding majestically.

Born in 1927, you died in 1989,
                     no doubt in some bastard 
foreign driftnet or deep water longline.
  Nylon can’t fly 
  nor fools heed the curse
             of the Ancient Mariner’s Rime.
So glide on Grandma, 
              glide on your satin silver wings,
              for great will be 
forever your beauty 
                   the memory of you brings -
 three million miles flown lost at sea.

              
                  Written: 1991

*Grandma was lost at sea aged at least
  62 years.
*She was at the time the oldest banded
  breeding albatross recorded.
*Taiaroa Head is in Otago, New Zealand.
*Shirley Webb was a conservationist
  and guide who lovingly looked after
  the albatross breeding colony.
*As of October 2022 Button still returns
  to Taiaroa Head to breed. He is 33 yo.

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