Poetry

Musical Buildings

Jennifer Compton

 

You have been playing musical buildings while I

have been away, visiting the world. And you have

 

been laying landmines, subtle, fragrant explosions

hoisting me, as I walk your streets, into an original

 

thought—it is a cunning city. Not what it was, yet

nothing is forgotten. As a tree dies, another grows.

 

My library in Lyall Bay is given over to private use

but the magic door up to the free books is still there.   

 

The Bank of New Zealand, opposite James Smiths,

is now a Burger King. James Smiths has absconded.

 

Wellington Central Library is the City Gallery, ok?

It’s the Botanic Garden, not the Botanical Gardens.

 

It never has been the Botanical Gardens. That’s just

what the locals like to call it in their whimsical way.

 

The National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum

are part of the Massey campus, I would swear they

 

had kept the linoleum if it wasn’t so patently new.

It squeaks underfoot with an eerie Proustian effect.

 

Wellington District Ambulance is now a wine bar.

The Public Trust houses Creative New Zealand.

 

Athletic Park has gone. So have the dangerous

playgrounds with their battering rams with which

 

we tried to kill each other and, mostly, didn’t succeed.

There was always one kid who would throw up though

 

if you kept on pushing higher while he screamed—Stop! 

And there is the building still decked out as E. Morris Jnr

 

where I viewed my father’s bedizened body in his coffin

which now trades in coffee and cake as Strawberry Fare.