through halls of mirrors

past the birthplace Rangiatea

across waves of blood – Mau,

takata Maoli, sovereignty

buried in the franchise contracts – oh

we are peoples united by more

than genes, by more than the tongues

of our ancestors reciting names

of great ones, we are united

by culture, by the psyche

of our cultures, our closeness

even in this age turned

against the sacred

43

The South Pacific Forum met recently in Rarotonga.

CHOGM meets soon – they’ve readmitted Fiji.

The powerful and the powerless

across (internationally) and vertically (internally).

Power is on show in Polynesia regularly.

44

the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian

languages has a common parent

Proto-Polynesian

which features a decimal number system

and a large list of words still found

throughout Polynesia

Captain Cook had Tupaia, a Tahitian interpreter

aboard who communicated with the tangata

whenua

Kateri says Hawaiians understand Maori

just think of the geography

we reached South America

because kumara, our staple root crop, is from there

perhaps Hawaiians commuted to America – what

given the Polynesian track record –

could have stopped them?

how did we do it? don’t we indicate the depth

of our guardianship by travelling

to Japan to retrieve original kumara stocks

from scientists just recently, this decade,

to ensure our intellectual

property (the root strain)

and diversity (biological)

are maintained?

45

the ingredients of the story –

a fantasy palace like the Civic

filled with dreams

and a winking ceiling

a dome to navigate the heavens by

imagine in 1929 414 elephants monkeys

salamanders proscenium arches

lions minarets according

to Jonathan Dennis’s guest

(it is true I have seen it)

dancers clothed only in gilt paint

people were conceived in the Civic

what drove the architects to this

ornamented grandeur?

The greatest theatre in the dominion …

A national institution …

Its brothers and sisters called the Regent,

St James, the Embassy, or simply

dead. The Auckland City Council will restore it,

but ‘mask’ the proscenium arch, the winged globe,

the winking lions. What kind of vandals are they?

They will restore it as a theatre for musicals –

but it’s a cinema! A waka is a vehicle for navigators,

a pitched symbol of the genius of our people,

its physical representatives held in glory.

Auckland doesn’t deserve the Civic.

46

it is feasible that we will enter

space

colonise planets call our spacecraft waka

perhaps name them after the first fleet

erect marae transport carvers renew stories

with celestial import

establish new forms of verse

free ourselves of the need for politics

and concentrate on beauty

like the release from gravity

orbit an image until it is absorbed

through the layers of skin

spin it

sniff and stroke the object

become poetic

oh to be in that generation

to write in freefall picking up the tools

our culture has given us

and to let them go again

knowing they won’t hit anyone

just stay up there

no longer subject to peculiarities

of climate the political economies