The Causeway at Bosherton, Ystad Ystagbwll/Stackpole Estate (UK) and Bridge to Nowhere, Whanganui National Park (NZ)

The Causeway at Bosherton, Ystad Ystagbwll/Stackpole Estate. Photo by Vikki Heywood

by Vikki Heywood

My bridge is a causeway, which also forms a dam. Built by The Cawdor family in Pembrokeshire, this large-scale intervention in the natural river flow creates impressive ponds which are famously covered in flowering waterlilies each year.

The Bridge to Nowhere, Whanganui National Park, Photo by Jayne Workman

Folly

With the flow, waiata drift,
hīnaki hang in trees,
wahine kōrero on whare steps,
watching tamariki splash in the sun.
In deep ravines,
lush with ponga and moss,
Mangapurua tumbles,
valley ghosts damp on her breath,
lost stories in every
drop.
From the landing,
returning soldiers trudge,
haversacks heavy with hope,
round perilous bluff, across impossible gorge,
dreams eclipsing doubt.
Hacking back-blocks, burning bush,
tilling temporary fields,
silent shells exploding
whisky-soaked nights,
it’s nature they fight this time.
Rose gardens, home hearths,
survived by concreted steel,
bridge’s elegant arch a lie.
Promise, gift,
taken, given?
Against,
not with,
the
flow.

by Jayne Workman

Now a tourist attraction for walkers, bikers and kayakers, this still remote bridge over the Mangapurua stream was completed in 1936. Connecting essential river transport with land ‘blocks’ offered to returning WW1 soldiers, it came too late to stem the flow of families leaving the settlement’s tough conditions.

A rare treat to collaborate in this way. Conversations about life as well as bridges and poetry enriched the creative process and were a genuine pleasure. Unexpectedly, in this random pairing, we discovered many shared themes, which we aimed to capture in the following ‘conversation’ across ten days, taking it in turns to write 26 words each to fulfil the 260-word brief. Vikki first.

Common Ground

An amusement: two rivers diverted, two Pembrokeshire valleys distorted, nature usurped, man-made. A blockage, doubling as a private nobleman’s causeway, born to inherit Ystad Ystagbwll. Meanwhile, Mangapurua’s remote acres of pristine bush-lavished gorge await their own colonial intervention as a distant war’s seeded - Aotearoa’s mirror story of folly and disrupted flow.

Wales and New Zealand have three languages – the shared one belongs to an invader; usurper of lands, voices: bipolar cultures.

Bilingual/ddwyieithog/reorua:

English/Welsh/Te Reo.

Respect.

Learn.

Taking what’s not given, giving what’s taken.

So we span the world; connecting, separating, building, destroying. In concrete and leaf, words and actions, such pride’s reflected.

Rise. Fall.

Forever – when measured in the hope of a generation – is fleeting. Our best and worst overcome by nature’s determination to reverse mankind’s status quo. Like returning soldiers, far upriver, hearts lifted by a promise, growing farms, families, friendships, flowers in isolation’s harsh soil. Nature a storm away from reclaiming it.

Clutching knapsacks, rods, sun hats and thermoses, they trek from the carpark, over the stone causeway, to penrhyn and tywyn. Public pathways following once private footsteps. So too in stripped river valleys where slips block roads, funds, futures. Ngahere, tangata, te awa reciprocate, restoring intricate, ancient harmonies. Somewhere for its nowhere bridge.

Mirrored countries: unmatched twins.

Time passing ahead or behind irrelevant. 

Words spoken are vital, earth’s inhabitants an interdependent ecosystem. Commonality is existence – interconnectivity stretches to eternity.

Above clouds, the sky is clear;

beyond words, no us and them;

in this circle, no lines or sides;

here, now, no two just one.

Vikki and Jayne