Sing to Me of Home

Today, for a heartbeat of time
the day mutes rain’s tattoo
unravels a sodden skein
from the sullen blanket of sky
lets through a quaver of white.

Not enough blue sky to make
a sailor a pair of pants
your father would say
before his proud heart surrendered
to time’s savage pecking.

The story of the poet’s motherless and peripatetic childhood is told in the poems of No One Home, followed by his time as a boy soldier in Home Base. Sing to Me of Home gathers the best of those poems into one volume along with work from three earlier collections and other poems published and new.

Keith Westwater’s work teases apart his own life with honesty and compassion, wry humour and rage, and applies that same lens to life in Aotearoa. Rugby, the Christchurch earthquakes, colonialism’s impact on native birds and the plight of Pōneke’s rough sleepers jostle each other alongside poems that exalt the everyday and celebrate those places we call home and all the ways they carry us.