Keith D Trestrail Poet Lyric

Notes About The Poem

Wrote this during the Covid pandemic as a laugh to kill some time never intending to post it, but now I think why not post it? Sam Hunt is a famous New Zealand poet. James K Baxter is another NZ poet who wrote a reply letter to Sam back in the late 1960s which inspired my own.

Ardern was NZ's socialist Prime Minister during Covid. The NZ parliament is colloquially known as The Beehive. Sam Hunt pictured above.

 

Listen to poem:

Letter to Sam Hunt

Dear Sam, hello it’s me, don’t fret
old friend whom I have never met.
I wrote a letter time forgot,
you may ask why, I ask why not?
A sad meditation of late
on our nation’s new police state -
its central thesis at its core
is blame the bastards and shame the whore!
It lay unopen and unread
cos my carrier pigeon fled.
A kiwi odyssey I seek
to find the man from Bottle Creek
on the Kaipara water’s edge
by windin’ estuaries and the sedge.

I’m just a pilgrim like you, Sam,
a vagabond - that’s all I am.
No signposts, GPS or apps -
just the moon and stars as my maps.
I’m a poet without a stage,
a biographer of my age
but we’re as far as I can see
surrounded by dumbfu*kery!
All was well with the world until
the old and comorbid got ill -
Gain of Dysfunction WuFlu hit
and everyone lost their sh*t
over a coronavirus - 
a hoax existential crisis.

And in this pandemic caper 
a mad grab for toilet paper,
madder still, I was told don’t ask
and wear a useless a-nal mask.
The rulin’ class in Wellington
lock down and answer to no one -
a canker on the bloom of youth
so fu*k their Ministry of Truth!
Ardern and her apparatchiks,
those faceless functionary pricks
who con us all surprise, surprise
spewin’ their propaganda lies.
And on people none the wiser
prey the narco men from Pfizer 

pushin’ their untested vaccine
while I get pissed in quarantine.
I wonder if James K Baxter
would have been an anti-vaxxer?
The gutless leaders who spread fear
threaten me but I don’t care.
I don’t need a jab to survive
from the queen bee in her Beehive -
well, she can jab it up her ar-se 
for this yellow plague too will pass.
In the Land of the Long Dark Cloud 
where our spirit was once unbowed
we were a pioneer people
but “baa baa” I fear we’re sheeple.

Sam, yours is a quicksilver tongue,
a voice in higher realms among,
somewhere between and born to be
the man and the mythology.
But me, I’m just a misanthrope
doin’ my best to live and cope -
I drink to outlaws and poets
who live and die by their wits,
to gypsies and minstrels who scorn
at all the crazy panic por-n!
Nothin’ anymore makes any sense
and no justice or consequence -
not for commie cu*ts in Beijing
or buttlicks who kiss Fauci’s ring,

not those sinophile U.N. flogs
or the rabid Big Pharma dogs.
It all seems to me way too sus,
a bad joke and the joke’s on us -
I’m tired of the insanity
and rage against its vanity
but I’ll have a tonic and gin
till the cold fog of death rolls in.
I’m no seer or philosopher,
just a man who’s been right so far -
a soldier in the culture war
up for a sh*tfight that’s for sure.
Let ‘em come for me if they will…
I’m ready to die on this hill.


    Written: March 2021

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Connie Pachecho February 16, 2025 at 6:53 AM Sam, I mean Keith, this poem is so funny in that it crosses the line in broad daylight. And to see the poem in the top 100 with dashes here and there is even funnier. Good job.