riariaki: uplift
Image Credit: Arihia Latham
The crash of living things
There are logs piled like
Sponge rolls
In the wharekai
Strangely foreign
They do not remind me
Of a forest
More like severed fingers
Of a thief
Did those fingers press in prayer
Shakespeare’s Antony
Begging pardon
From the earth
A meek apology
Against such butchers
I think of what the whenua must look like
Her skin, as if hot waxed
Is rashed, lumpy and infected
Stumps of her hair in patches
As if the clinician was blind
Her wounds weep
For this whāngai forest
Not even her own children
But borrowed species
On borrowed time
The chainsaws arrive
A chorus of aggression
Like social workers coming to uplift in the night
The crash of living things
Becoming logs
Of families
Becoming statistics
Where is the Rata bound to the Rimu?
The ferns, soft slippers at their feet
Epiphytes daring to droop from the canopy
Nanny’s pounamu earrings.
Did they ask her
About the baby
Did they ask her or
Press their fingers in prayer and
Send a meek apology
Pardoning the butchers.
Name her after me
I imagine you in a coma
Waking after most of the moon’s refrain,
And he is gone.
Feeling into your memory must have been like unwrapping a parcel.
Tugging at the twine.
Your gut knew something your mind could not find.
Locating the tape, scratching at it till peeled off in unsatisfying strips.
Glimpses of going to a wedding, of happiness.
Where is he?
Brown paper first
Is his whānau hiding him- they didn’t want him to marry a Pākehā.
Bubble wrap next. Why does everything you had feel like a dream?
You pause for breath.
Nanny runs you a bath.
She tells you it’ll be alright.
The water laps over new purple etched scars.
She tells you it was head on.
A drunk driver.
Your hands roll over your belly
It was to house his beautiful babies
It was to stretch with different scars than these.
I will always look after you says Nanny.
Can she see in the future.
When she is a whisper in the wind.
Can she name your future children
Without her own scorning you?
The parcel is wrapped in coloured paper,
The future
The past
The tikanga of missing a tangi
Due to unconsciousness
And then grieving this conscious
Brain into living.
Name her after me e hine.
She whispered as the hill rose
Before your puku.
Years had passed
Only some memories
Washed in with the tide
And she left with many of them
In her soft hands
Her prompts for you so
You could start a new life
But.. e hine
Face the past while stepping into the future.
Name her after me.
Little Potato
Te Whiti asked on his return
Who these little potatoes were
Knowing they were the children of that day
They were his and theirs
And nothing peaceful
Was in their making
The Whaea from Parihaka
She’s from my children’s marae
Says our whakapapa
Is woven like a kete kaimoana
Strong but loose
Everlasting, she says as she holds my back to karanga
My tupuna
Sang outside the caves at Ōtākou to offer solace
Smuggled food to the chained yet still peaceful prisoners
Buried their dead
I te tikanga tūturu
The Toroa swooped
Carving the rugged coastline
With their wingspan of hope
The feathers linking our people
Loose but strong
Pinned to all that came after
Even the little potatoes.
New colonies
You traverse
The ulna's coat-
A tight leather number.
The valley of brachialis is
Deforested, creased like
Beet leaves.
You brush lightly-
An epidermal erosion
Melanin scatters
Metamorphic rocks
Dapple the
Honeyed hue in
Bloodlines of the sun
Bronzing the arc
Of the humerus
You note a
Colony has begun.
Cellular division
It started with
All your tūpuna
Lined up on the paepae
Your chromosomal karyotype
Stable as your maunga
Coursing as fluidly as your awa.
They stood and leaned in
For the hongi with all of my
Hapū.
They lassoed time,
Crossing centuries as
Together they began
This great divide
Dividing cells until division
Became cohesive
Recognisable to us all
As its own unified beginning.
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