A Herbal Whiff

Sir: Why is Mr Smithyman so anxious to save me from the sin of ancestor- worship? I remember reading about a village, in the Solomon Islands I think, where each man kept a pile of family skulls under his own gumtree. A European passing by happened to see a Solomon Islander holding an aged skull in his hands and blowing tobacco smoke lovingly between its jaws.

‘Ahyee, Grandpa!’ he crooned. ‘Does it taste good?’

The skull was his grandfather’s and tobacco was not grown in the spirit- world.

All that Mr Smithyman says of Mr Cresswell’s ballad is true enough. But what Mr Cresswell, Mr Alan Mulgan, and David McKee Wright have in common is that each of them has written at least one whacking good poem (Mr Smithyman has written a good many). I count a man who has written one good poem a poet; and further, I am inclined to believe that the one-good-poem man is a tragic figure. What, I wonder, prevented him from finding again the spot where he buried his insight? Good advice? A withered spermatic cord? Journalism? Burns Night gatherings? Auckland booze? Marriage? A varsity lectureship? The NZBS? The herb of intellectual passion does not grow in that dark world where he wonders. Why should I not blow a whiff of it between his aged jaws?

1956 (148)