Oh Dirty River by Helen Lehndorf

The town where I grew up

was small, ugly and smelled
like burning blood.

Most of the dads and 

a lot of the mums and
heaps of the big brothers and sisters 

worked at the Freezing Works.

Thousands of cows and sheep 

and even a few hundred pigs 

would get trucked in, slaughtered,
chopped up and packaged 

in cling film each day.

The burning-blood smell 

came from the incinerator
where they would burn
the bits left over.
Though, some of it got pumped 

right into the river
which ran through the town.

In our town, 

people called the works
‘The University’ 

because it was where most of us
ended up going after we left school.

People also used to
call our town ‘Lavender City’ 

because of the burned-flesh stink.
So you can’t say
we didn’t have a sense of humour.

Yeah. You could make a joke 

about it. But only if you’re
from there, eh?

Otherwise, you’re just

getting smart.

Editor: Tim Jones

Credit note: "Oh Dirty River" was first published in Kaupapa: New Zealand poets, world issues, edited by Hinemoana Baker and Maria McMillan (Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara: Development Resource Centre, 2007), and is included in Helen Lehndorf's poetry collection The Comforter (Wellington: Seraph Press, 2011). "Oh Dirty River" is reproduced by permission of the author, Helen Lehndorf, and the publisher, Seraph Press.

Tim says: I like "Oh Dirty River" for a number of reasons, one of which is autobiographical: I spent part of my childhood in another freezing works town, Mataura. My Dad worked at the New Zealand Paper Mills plant which was directly across the Mataura River from the freezing works, and that smell of burned flesh Helen describes in this poem was all too familiar to me as I walked or biked to visit him.

A few years later, I had a Varsity holiday job that involved measuring the paper mill's effluent stream. That took me down to the riverbank, where, opposite me, I could see the blood-rich, blood-red untreated freezing works effluent that burst from the cliff on which the freezing works stood and plumed into the river, adding a red stain to the multi-coloured stains produced by the paper mill. There were some very large eels in that river.

But I also love Helen's poem because it catches both the matter-of-factness of life in a small town that makes its living from the death of thousands of animals, and the half-proud defensiveness of anyone who's grown up in such a town and heard it mocked by the rest of the country. It may be a dump, we think to ourselves - but it's our dump.

After you have read "Oh Dirty River", check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar!

Tim Jones is a Wellington author, poet, editor and anthologist. His most recent book is poetry collection Men Briefly Explained (IP, 2011). He is currently, with P.S. Cottier, co-editing The Stars Like Sand, an anthology of Australian speculative poetry that is due for publication in 2014. You can find out more on Tim's blog Books in the Trees.