for somewhere closer to sea-level
where they needn’t top-dress the soil with cobalt
and their young stock didn’t wither away.

But the farm just had to sit there, languishing
for anyone who might wander by and want it,
while ragwort sniggered in the long grass;

and the hall couldn’t up and walk off: it lay
under its drooping macrocarpas and wilted,
letting the blackberries crawl over its roof –

the piano is still under the wreckage.
No one revived the post office
that Susan Dassler had run in her front room;

the butcher’s shop in a hut by the roadside
where you helped yourself and recorded your purchase
in a notebook somehow faded away;

a bus took the children to Ngutunui.
And after all, what else had there been but the hall,
the butcher’s shop, the post office and the school? –

wrote Susan Dassler with her ‘Pioneer’s Pen’.