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2 | InTouch AUTUMN 2023 NEWS ROUNDUP Central Branch celebrate Christmas Poetic recognition Congratulations to our Central Region member, Marion Moxham, who has had one of her poems published by the NZ Poetry Society . Beneath are wings I lean my head against a hospital window and shut my eyes. A tapping through the glass alerts me to a black-and-white, lemon-eyed pigeon eyeing me. Her white mate with one black spot on his back arrives soon after. They coo and dance and I calm. Now I’m back in hospital the lemon-eyed pigeon and her white mate with one black spot find me and visit my window ledge every day. Next time round a doctor comes to tell me I will have a pacemaker inserted in a few days. No sooner said than a 5-point something earthquake rocks us 4 floors up in a U-shaped building on rollers. The doctor, new from Europe doesn’t know what it is and with her fright and unsteadiness needs to sit on my bed, never mind the notices above every patient’s bed asking visitors not to sit on beds because it breaks them. She leaves the room. Immediately a snow-white pigeon arrives on my window ledge, eying me for two minutes. Sideways in its beak is a thin green 10 cm stalk with a piece of green leaf one end. Everything will be all right. Home again, a white pigeon flies noisily overhead until I look up. I think it is a noisy tui. The pigeon sits on the roof, watching me. Sun on its back it looks like an angel with a white aura. Beautiful. My neighbour finds a stone-cold dead white pigeon under a nearby lamp post. ‘It’s caught in sunstrike and hit the post and stunned itself,’ he says. ‘The fall has broken its neck.’ I spook. No pigeons here in 17 years. What does it mean? The pigeon’s mate is flying over to try to tell me it has lost its love? I shudder. The neighbour buries the dead. I try to put it out of my mind but the pigeon’s mate keeps coming back. On New Year’s Day I lose consciousness and need CPR. Thanks to being in ED I survive: my heart too fast to refill and circulation gone. Next day a Life Flight to Wellington. A diagnosis known as ‘broken heart syndrome’. But the heart can heal from this. When I go back to Wellington for surgery my daughter tells me she’s a sudden covid contact and arranges for a friend to take me. Unnerved I look on the roof next door and 7 white pigeons sit in a row, looking at me for 15 minutes. In the middle is a black one with a white tail. I calm. My daughter’s friend is going to Wellington for his daughter’s wedding in Melbourne and will meet his nearly 2-year-old grand- daughter for the first time. I travel in the car with this stranger, and my grandson stays with me in the motel to wheel me to the hospital at 6.30 the next morning. He moved toWellington only two days before for his new job. Central Branch 2022 Christmas events from around the region!