See what a little moonlight can do to you?
The moon is a gondola.
It has stopped rocking.
Yes. It’s stopped now.
And to this high plateau
its stunning influence
on surge and loll of tides
within us should
somehow not go
unremarked
for want of breath
or oxygen.
And if I
to that magic micro-second
instant
involuntary arms reach out
to touch……detain
then surely
it is because you
are so good:
so very good to me.
On a Theme by Hone Taiapa
Tell me poet, what happens to my chips
after I have adzed our ancestors
out of wood?
What happens to your waste-words, poet?
Do they limp to heaven, or go down easy
to Raro-henga?
And what about my chips, when they’re
down—and out? If I put them to fire
do I die with them?
Is that my soul’s spark spiralling; lost
to the cold night air? Agh, let me die
another hundred times: eyeball
to eyeball I share bad breath
with the flared nostrils of the night.
For it’s not me I leave behind: not me.
Only the vanities of people:
their pleasure, their wonder and awe
alone remain.
Bite on this hard, poet: and walk careful.
Fragmented, my soul lies here, there: in
the waste-wood, around.
DandyID
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Posterous
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Hone Tuwhare is for lovers.
Lovers of the Pacific Rim (as opposed to this, which is one of my favourite movies).
I remember seeing that movie during a film festival, before all the theatres got renovated, in was in Auckland, and the seats deceptively springy, smelling of the past. A very quiet experience. this year I want to go to the artic circle.
It wasn’t until I saw the Medem film that I paid much attention in my imagination to the habitable parts of the Arctic Circle. Now when the north of Europe is in the news, it’s the first thing of which I think.
hone was not tht great….he was alright but he needs to swear less coz poetry is abt gentleness but still some irony
Tuwhare: you post under the name of a poet whom you think is “not tht great”?
Being a poet means I can go against my own best advice this one time (at present I only talk about my friend Eusa’s writings because they are so good), however…
Hone, you are that good (and fortunately you never needed to know that).
Open Letter to Hone Tuwhare-in-wood-chips:
You wonʻt remember me, but we met once, at Queen Liliʻuokalani Centre, Honolulu.
You nodded. ʻImaikalani introduced us. I had never heard of you. I said nothing also. You were extraordinarily ugly, as I am too. We made a pair, i thought, for a marquee. Then I heard you read. Lord! said I. Youʻre a marquee already. Years later, in Aotearoa, I went looking for you. I had read ALL your poems. Lord! said i.
If I ever see you, what would i say? You bastard! Lord, but I love you! But all i could do was lie flat on the grass outside that cantilevered Glass Cinema Theatre block in Auckland and, looking up at the robin blue sky, tell you –Lord, I missed you again. When i ʻm a wood chip, weʻll meet. Lord! you bastard, i love you. whole earth furniture or Kauri wood chip, mahalo piha.
To Everybody else:
Hone is the most incorruptible, corruptedly beautiful, lyric poet Polynesia ever gave birth to — and thank god for the Maori socialists and Mason feeding you soup bowls of the English language. it didnʻt annihilate te ʻorero Maori, but informed us of English and its cadences through the rich resonances of Maori.
without killing te orero Maori. Hone could have written about spitoons. if he were in love with them. He lived inside the vision of the languages he loved.
He married them. And was not above divorce. Incorruptibly a great catalyst.
Doggerel: Hone Tuwhare, Poet Extraordinaire
Hawaiʻi Visit, 1980ʻs. The Navigator bird flew to my nest/the wind at his back; the ocean in a roar/He saw what he saw, went home and wrote/as he had seen and what before.
Maori Return, l980ʻs. And how may we know what he had for text ?/When there was nothing new, but another erection?/The truth, the truth of what there was/is how we privelege expectation / He had the wind and a cry of his own/which he owned/which is saying heʻs with us enough/ even when weʻre alone, as he was, testing and toughing things out.
TWO DOGGERELS
Doggerel 1, Revised: Hone Tuwhare, Poet Extraordinaire
Hawaiʻi Visit, 1980ʻs. The Navigator bird flew to my nest/the wind at his back; the ocean in a roar/He saw what he saw, went home and wrote/as he had seen and what before.
Maori Return, l980ʻs. And how may we know what he had for text ?/When there was nothing new, but another erection?/The truth, the truth of what there was/is how we privelege expectation / He had the wind and a cry of his own/which he owned/which is saying heʻs with us enough when about/ even when weʻre alone, as he was, testing and toughing things out.
Doggerel 2. Hone Tuwhare, In Spiritu, ex corpora, sine wood-chip. This is not a Requiescat but a Natales. Cf. The Law of the Conservation of Energy and Matter (Count Lavoisier, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Penzias-&-Wilson). No energy or matter is created or destroyed — only transformed.
e Hone,
you were 86 long/ I am 80 years long/-still singing your song/
you bastard, i love you/whatever happens, expecting nothing will, too//
Itʻs late, said the bird//Thatʻs destiny or fate/ said an idiot (or priest
as he may be)//The sad /funny/truth is thereʻs nothing/we can do to undo
to do better/but embrace or say Hi! by such as this letter// through Megan,
with thanks/to feel better./youʻre wood-chip a little, then star dust or spittle/whatever — you bastard, i love you.