Guttural Language
Image: Irihipeti Waretini
My Reo doesn’t ask for much
Just the sweetest tip off a rounded tongue
It implies, that the lilts
In my tone should be a little more jovial
Like an old man
Who’s weight in years
Bears fully on his mutter.
It helps to have the gutter of my sound
Resonate around the locked
Chambers of my memory mind,
Where I seek to find
That slowly rhythmed song that
Once lured my ancestor along
The sheath of furthest blue sea.
What would I see if my Reo
Could unwind the barbed wire
Entwining my pākehā mind
And take it all, not just
Half of the waffles that time
Has held my whakapapa memories in.
To speak in an old tongue,
Without the delicacy of ones
Young half-cocked gun and
A barrel that’s wear is faded
By years of bullet dodging –
Is to liberate the age of
The dawn soldiers
Brave confusion at the hearth of
The wise master’s worth
As he lowers his soul pay
The old fools toll.
For your youth without
Our hurt is a lesson not
Learnt and a tongue in the
Gutter cannot possibly utter
The winds of its home and
The stars of its tomb to
Release the great beast who
Finds us - the taniwha
Trapped in an idea that’s so
Very, very far away.
The haunting
Survives its last, breath…
My tongue pauses to shudder.
The course of its searching has
Come to an end.
And with it released
Is the power unleashed
Of Papatūānuku’s great strife -
That we small humans might
Somehow fuck it all up
If we don’t suck it up
And refuse the great curse
That starts with a verse
In a motherless tongue
By a king and his gun -
Oppression
Lingers
Silence.
But in the hearts of the brave
And the stirring of the grave
A connection of life
Unites the divide
We’re alive. And we speak
Down the gutter of the street
Streams our spinning of deceit
And it lands at our feet –
But, does my voice raise
The shattered bones of trees,
Or will they not hear me
In my languaged other tongue?
Will they finally abandon me,
When they see the façade
Fall wistfully by my side
As I reach
For yet another secret
Another tomb to raid
Who am I to stand?
To call and raise the dead?
I am the living,
The product.
The curse.
So I stand with feet firm
And Hine-nui-te-Pō’s wink
On the barrel of my own gun
While the madman clings to his
Last relevant cause
“Defamation!” he cries to the bulletin future.
The frightened herald scoops
His bedraggled carcass
From its irrelevant heap
I pause a guilty smirk,
For complete and utter anarchy.
The old guard is finally dying.
And we.
We other tounges.
We silenced minds.
We haunted children.
We wandering home.
We, are the liberation.