Wordsshiftminds - Komata Reefs Lyrics

Paeroa is baking in the late afternoon heat
Of a New Zealand summer's day
The antique and collectibles shops on Belmont Road
Are sultry hothouses, their ballet of oscillating electric fans
Scarcely whisking the blood-viscous air

I turn my back on them and round the corner onto Hall Street
And ahead of me, borne on the bow-wave of a cooling breeze
Appears a long ridge, far off, like a face from a dream
At this distance it is as unanticipated as a razor's edge
It's ten kilometres away and called Komata Reefs
But in this moment I know only what I see

An exclamation mark of nature
So much itself I can take in nothing but
The ridge in the golden hour's glow
Hall Street evaporates like a mirage
The fire station ahead, the cycle stand
Its shop-front verandas and faded surface markings
But all at once there is more to me than there was before

There was the me before I turned that corner
And the me that has existed since I set eyes on
The astonishment of Komata Reefs
Like a miner stumbling on a nugget of gold

In my mind that ridge will always be air-honed
Knife blade parched green against brutal blue
At the end of Hall Street, Paeroa
In the summer haze of the twenty-first century