Katherine Mansfield: To L. H. B. (1894-1915)

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Red Mistletoe, Hopkins River, New Zealand: photo by William M. Connolley, December 2005

Last night for the first time since you were dead
I walked with you, my brother, in a dream.
We were at home again beside the stream
Fringed with tall berry bushes, white and red.
“Don't touch them: they are poisonous,” I said.
But your hand hovered, and I saw a beam
Of strange, bright laughter flying round your head
And as you stooped I saw the berries gleam.
“Don't you remember? We called them Dead Man's Bread!”
I woke and heard the wind moan and the roar
Of the dark water tumbling on the shore.
Where -- where is the path of my dream for my eager feet?
By the remembered stream my brother stands
Waiting for me with berries in his hands...
“These are my body. Sister, take and eat.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923): photographer unknown, 1912; image by Yohan euan o4, 23 October 2008

Pittosporum crassifolium, Pukerua Bay, New Zealand: photo by Pseudopanax, 1 August 2006

Ngaio or Mousehole Tree (Myoporum laetum): photo by Júlio Reis, 19 June 2004

The man in the moon becomes, in Maori legend, a woman, one Rona by name. This lady, it seems, once had occasion to go by night for water to a stream. In her hand she carried an empty calabash. Stumbling in the dark over stones and the roots of trees she hurt her shoeless feet and began to abuse the moon, then hidden behind clouds, hurling at it some such epithet as "You old tattooed face, there!" But the moon-goddess heard, and reaching down caught up the insulting Rona, calabash and all, into the sky. In vain the frightened woman clutched, as she rose, the tops of a ngaio-tree. The roots gave way, and Rona with her calabash and her tree are placed in the front of the moon for ever, an awful warning to all who are tempted to mock at divinities in their haste. -- William Pember Reeves: The Long White Cloud, 1899

Katherine Mansfield's birthplace, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand: photo by Lanma726, 3 December 2007

Myoporum sandwicense, habitat, sunrise: photo by Forest & Kim Starr, 29 October 2004

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923): To L. H. B. (1894-1915), from Poems at the Villa Pauline, 1916, in Poems, 1923

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. This is what I must do.

-- Journal entry for 19 December 1920, in The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), ed. J. Middleton Murry

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