...run(ning) up a blind alley full of hatred and dark breath.

Listening to Afternoons on National Radio one afternoon last week I was lucky enough to hear Gary McCormack, a resident of Christchurch, reading this poem:

What the Drummer said to the Drum

Sitting in my comfortable chair in Dunedin in  the days following the earthquake I had felt an urge to write a poem in response. But in the end I felt that from said chair there was nothing I should say. 

At the time of the destruction of the world trade centre in 2001 I was enrolled in a poetry writing course at university.  That day in my comfortable chair halfway around the world I penned a poem.  It involved a sleeping Dorothy in a field of poppies, winged monkeys gnawing at her breasts.  The Lion roared. The Tin Man discarded his heart.  I can't remember what the scarecrow did. The imagery seemed so apt. I am still embarrassed by it.

When it comes, as Gary mentions at the end of his poem, to making sense of it...

There's a blog I read by a theologian-philosopher Glenn Peoples.  At times I feel compelled to argue with him in the comments over trifling points relating to larger issues he supports, but on the whole I respect his posts explaining various religious and philosophical subjects, and the depth of reading he draws on for these.  I don't go to church, but when I did, after the music, I did enjoy sermons interpreting the scripture. Where I live, the Bible is still the source of many of our ideas on morality, the nature of our existence, and how we cope with adversity, so even if you would take nothing else from it it's still worth appreciating. So I read him.

Anyway, in his latest post, Glenn quotes a verse about a man born blind. The disciples question Jesus about him and the response is given - “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

Harsh if you're the blind man, but that to me is the function that disasters, whether in New York, China, Pakistan or right here on our doorstep and involving people we know serve for humanity.

Stories that are worth the telling are told again and again.  Shakespeare is re-presented and remade (RichardIII - High Noon, The Taming of the Shrew - Ten Things I Hate about You, I'm going from memory here, correct me if the titles are wrong) And every child that goes to Sunday School gets their chance to fill a role in the annual nativity play.

This time we see our own countrymen taking up roles in the disaster story.

A woman is trapped in a collapsed building.  Her fiance waits outside while rescuers search the building. They were to get married that friday.  Miraculously she is rescued, largely unscathed.  The wedding goes ahead in a church unaffected by the quake and all the invited guests are able to attend.

A man's family see him on live television being carried, covered in soot, from a destroyed shopping mall.  Days later they have called every hospital they can think of and still have no idea of his whereabouts.

An "awesome maori guy" is caught on camera seconds after a building falls lifting huge blocks of masonry to rescue people from the debris. His name, by the way, from the Herald article, suggests he's actually a pacific islander in case he wanted that acnowledged.

Some dairy owners are reported as charging nearly double the usual price for bread and milk. (I seem to remember when something similar happened after the Edgecumbe earthquake, the shop owner in question was all but run out of town.)

A man whose family survived and was sitting at home wondering how to help is told just to sit tight. That wasn't enough for him so he canvases local businesses for donations of coffee and tea supplies and sets about providing refreshments to rescue workers. (Little things like this bring tears to my eyes.)

Families recieve texts and phonecalls from people trapped alive under ruins.  It seems that some of these texters will not be rescued.

And there are reports of looters and drunkenness.

From the best of luck to the cruellest of fate, from self sacrifice to selfishness.  Our people have found themselves arbitrarily cast in roles in a story that is retold on different stages around the world again and again and again.  As a child I was proud to be given the role of Joseph in the Nativity Play, and then disgruntled when I realised it wasn't a speaking part. We play the parts we are given, though how we play them is sometimes up to us.

In the end I can probably make no more sense of this than Gary, who was there.