What will not rise

Lines written on the 40th anniversary of the Tasman Bridge Collapse

Forty years on and the dead have not yet risen

have not spilled themselves

up the bridge’s pylons,

the young couple still holding hands.

Sunday drivers.

Dr Jones of Bellerive had been to visit his wife.

Visiting hours over they kissed goodnight,

and he left (with regret and some relief?)

the eternal twilight of the ward.

Night had truly settled in.

He drove out of town in the drizzling rain.

People in their homes heard the collision

thinking of Cyclone Tracy, still in the news,

or the Mt St Canice boiler explosion

which killed laundry workers, a delivery man

amd a young apprentice boilermaker

the September before

when the plum trees were flush with blossom.

Four months on they'd be heavy with fruit.

Did Jones hear it, feel the vibration through the bridge, 

and the metal body of the car, into his seat and up his spine.

Did it rattle his teeth?

Joyce Stoakey, on her way home from church,

Pamela and Tony Sward, not long married,

young Bobby Rezek, still a kid.

They’d have seen the lights on the bridge go out

and, almost an afterthought,

how the white lines on the road

suddenly ended.

Sylvia, Frank and the others

waving their arms,

Pamela saying, 'Slow down,

Tony, slow down.' Too late 

to steer a course

away from the void,

away from history.

I was nine days old,

our car was rear ended

the day my parents brought me home from hospital

no reason anyway

for them to leave home on a Sunday night

in the rain with a newborn baby and another small child, 

and make the journey to the other side of the river. 

Still, a shock to them,

my father believed in the modern world.

Now most days my mother drives across the bridge,

up and over the crest, keeping left,

to where my father will end his days,
in the Queen Victoria Home for the Aged.

My parents’ marriage divided, 

east and west.

Under the bridge

rolling with the tides

the wreck of the ship
does not rise.