Pukapuka Poem #39 Takapuna: buy the sea - Michael O'Leary

Takapuna: buy the sea

(America’s Cup review, 1986 – 87)

The whole country

Acted like the ‘Olde Mug’ –

The peasants again duped

By the glittering gold phrases

Of the middle-class gentry

Television pirates:

Protectors of the public mind

And pilferers of the public purse

Nightly filled our hedonistic heads

With age-old delusions

“Both yachts will be

looking for real estate –

but the leader’s got the edge”.

And it was the same on land

As in the inane commentary box

If you told someone

You owned an underwater acre

Off the coast of Whangaparoa or

Takapuna, or Milford, you would have

Made a million for you overnight

But now in the cold grey dawn

Of falling shares and broken illusions

We look and see El Dorado and the Golden Calf

Are just another brick shit-house, and

The America’s Cup is back where it belongs