ACROSS THE WHITED FIELDS

THE FIRST DAY

In a twilight street
a small girl laughing.

The red and yellow flowers
profuse, inhale the air.

We want to hold your name,
Polly, dancing in the rain

Polly, skipping down the street.
Sometimes the world bequeaths

then takes away the one to whom
our hearts will open wide.

We were beguiled. You are so innocent
so innocent so innocent.

THERE IS A LOCH in the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland, Loch Avon, where the waters are so clear, so bright, that wading into them and confronted by the unexpected depth and clarity, writer Nan Shepherd later wrote in The Living Mountain of “a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped”.

When I set out to write of place, of the mountains and stream in my valley in Central Otago, the tor-serrated hills, and the village where over the years people have arrived to live, I did not think I would come to write of the loss of one of them, a young woman so bright in spirit it was as if we had had an innocent set down amongst us.

How can I write of Polly, who was broken by the world, without thinking of that clear loch, in the land her family set out from, where water pours over “grim bastions” yet carries no sediment? The waterfall itself, Shepherd wrote, seemed “to distil and aerate the water so that the loch far below is sparkling clear”.

Polly had long purple hair, black-rimmed glasses and an array of wild and coloured clothing. (“That lady with the awesome clothes,” nine-year-old Jude said.) Polly walking down the one street in our village in scarf and shorts and steampunk tights and red sunglasses, wide-eyed at the hills around her, black labrador Lola at her side.

Into this village of farmers and truckers had first come one poet, then others; people seeking community or quietness, those who stayed in their garden or those who leant on their gate to talk. Then there was Polly in tartan and bangles, skipping down the street. She’d just turned 40, yet had the spirit of a child, dazzling in her beauty, innocent even of the machinations of agriculture. One night at the pub, sheep farmer Ken tried to explain to her the