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With canoe and hook of a jawbone
  below a great fish Maui snared,
and his brothers half-crazed behaving
  leapt and gouged in frenzy craving.
From Palliser Bay to Cape Reinga 
 (departing place of the spirits),
from Egmont in the west to Mt Hikurangi 
  where dawn’s light is first to see

Home where the far north narrows
  to the old thousand year Kauri,
when whalers from its tall trunks vast
  made the finest spar and mast.
In those giant limbed canopied pillars
  echo the sounds of the ages,
from coast to coast on great sandy reach
  Doubtless Bay to Ninety Mile Beach

Hokianga to Kaipara to Waitemata 
  with coves and tawny sandhills,
where navigators of old voyaged erstwhile
  Hauraki Gulf and Great Barrier Isle.
To yon trail where the mighty trio rise -
  Ruapehu, Tongariro, Ngauruhoe,
with their deep crater lakes and icy snow
  spew ash and rock on plains below

In rocky Coromandel Peninsula hills
  once glittered nuggets of gold,
now all that glitters its coves and bends
  is the sun off the Firth of Thames.
Land of the ancient Maori fortified pa
  and colony pioneer settlements,
when village tribes gathered in bounty
  food of the earth and sky and sea

Down the gorge rapids of Huka Falls
  a maelstrom of turquoise green,
and beyond its wild white water waves
  Waitomo’s dark and glowing caves.
A journey through its volcanic plateau
  basalt and granite igneous rock,
wherein lies the great caldera so steep
  in the heart of Taupo’s big deep

Beech forests whisked by desert winds,
  wilderness and eeling swamps -
volcanic pumice flats that dormant lie
  and molten fountains in the sky.
Willow trees, poplars, totara, pines
  on Lake Waikaremoana’s shore.
Poverty Bay, where Captain Cook said
 “there behold! Young Nick’s Head”

In Frying Pan’s Echo Lake cauldron,
  Venus Baths, Champagne Pool.
Rotorua’s hot sulphurous breath await
  in muddy springs at Hell’s Gate.
See hidden valleys and mountain mists
  in its ring of fire, this shaky isle -
by smouldering cliffs at their sheerest
  a thermal wonderland silica terrace

The moa hunters roamed this land
  in the forest and on the plains -
now the tattooed warrior becomes so
  like that flightless bird long ago.
From the depths of myth and legend
  these spirits of its ancestors live -
where a morning sun has its sky reared
  it wakes the great fish Maui snared


            Written: May 1996
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