A house is not a home if it isn’t in your heart.
A house is not a home if it isn’t the place that lifts your dreams
And makes you smile and puts the gladness in your eyes
When the sun sinks in the west and the summer lingers on.
Our Mount Tiger home was filled with love and kindness
They all belonged, the children laughing, the turbid teens,
The thieving possums, lonely pheasants and quirky quails,
The irritating huhu bugs, mesmerising puriri moths and startled skinks.
Our house was small but wore a warm place in our hearts
Our lives were kneaded and fashioned and left to prove in the sun.
Going home at the end of the day was like a long slow sigh
As the work was left behind and we were back where we belonged.
Alison Jean Hankinson
d’Verse poetics
The challenge for poetics was to write about a building and we were really supposed to create it. This was our home on Mount Tiger, a small rectangular box atop a hill with a steep acre of bush, and we were the visitors the custodians of the land, we shared our home and landscape with all who had come before us and thrived around us. We had lavender for the bees, wildflowers for the butterflies, cabbages for the caterpillars, and I think the birds and rabbits lived off my vegetable garden. It was a beautiful home for my family to grow up in. We didn’t build it but we did grow it.
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