Old Man Nor'wester -The Bard Doggerel Collective

https://barddoggerelcollective.bandcamp.com/album/volcanoes-glaciers,#davideggleton,#richardcwallis,#nzmusicmonth,

Old Man Nor’ wester
Sometimes Old Man Nor’wester blows, and so exhumes,
amidst dust moving, shingle skating, braids shifting,
the rainshadow shape of sheep rustler James McKenzie,
who strolled, dead broke and crook to boot, only to fluke
a landscape he wrapped up tight and carried like a swag,
taking seven league strides across the Mackenzie country,
preaching sermons in Gaelic to his dog as skinks lay hidden
like shrunken dragons amongst rocks of sub-alpine basins
furrowed back to basics by that wind; tufts of wool
chasing across the barrel-vault-blue vastness of the sky.
McKenzie, though, vanished beyond lost cairn markers
long ago, his straggly beard legacy of wilding pines,
ragwort, yorkshire fog, yarrow, gorse, king devil,
mouse-eared hawkweed, a rogues gallery gathering
in our sanctum sanctorum of ancient lakes and rivers
we will not sandblast back to the past; as powerlines
sough, and scullers row for New Zealand against drag
on Ruataniwha; and rabbits start from bootfalls
in this mirrorland of desires rustled for subdivisions,
hydro-electric dams, boating, the remains of film sets.
Dragonfly wheel energies of Lakes Tekapo, Pukaki,
Ohau, the colour of ground-down pounamu, spin
into the Waitaki, as Old Man Nor’wester skips
dynamic water, flicks it over, rippling sunshine’s
dismantle of ice into scalding light; until the light
darkens, pent-up, or sings seawards, past folded
hills seamed with gullies, farmers’ corrugated faces,
electricity snaking north and south, the fizz of life;
and then in the night those gusts trying to prise open
a greenstone door slammed tight on the underworld.