A precious writing week by the sea

Ōtepoti Dunedin writer Megan Kitching, the inaugural recipient of the new Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writers Residency in 2021, has just completed her week at the Caselberg House remarking, “What a precious writing week by the sea this has been. I can’t thank the Caselberg Trust enough."

The residency is named after well-known and much-loved Dunedin writer Elizabeth Brooke-Carr who died in 2019 and will be held for one week each year. It was established thanks to generous fundraising undertaken by Elizabeth’s family, friends, and colleagues who wanted to create an annual residency for emerging writers in her honour at the Caselberg House in Broad Bay.

Megan has gifted us with a poem from her residency.

There is a Little Beach

Many such plank steps cut behind houses

through agapanthus, zigging at a newel post 

or hand-rope over tumbles of shored-up boulders,

garden giving way to coast, crocosmia, ice plants.

Descending, you can hear between out-hanging 

trees the sea’s grey sheen begin lapping, louder, 

yet the beach tucks away all that might tell 

of grit, pebble or sand, or what the tide is up to.

Each bay a familiar secret, humid salt-mist

netted in cliffs and clefts where boatsheds

lean to catch the wash bringing in worlds

of float and wrack, the rigging clink of the main.

Under deck and pillars, doubly hidden, 

submerged shivers stir, dank tangles of worm-

eaten wood and barnacle so close to sea-floor 

shadow, before the relief of surfacing air.

Shags peg out their wings, peer and preen 

as you crunch downshore with the smaller eye

of gull or oystercatcher hunting for shine

in a shell, nacreous snails, a pool’s flicker.

The rocks, the sand, are always particular;

sediments and middens, here, of oxblood

and gold-rust like frozen dunes whorled, 

heaved, then lain in cakes, gently shelving.

In veins, quartz grains round as the stones

that wore drop-holes in the clay, as beads

on seaweed necklets you might wear, as the wheel 

of a slipway winch, as daylight on this cove.

Megan Kitching, March 2021