and waving round and round.

We’re at the right Bus Stop.

The timetable says they should pull up.

But signal and you lose an arm.

Or it’s the tourist bus. Or you’re told

by your mates about the last time

they signalled and how it freaked them out.

Sometimes it’s just plain tough to stand

on the street – everybody else has wheels.

Why turn and face the sun, knowing

that justice is going to run you down?

In the cool nights when stars slide

above street lamps, it’s easy to look up –

much easier to think of waka crews

and hear in traffic the inside of a shell.

51

52

my cousin Billy said to me on Friday

that he was going to navigate his way

up to Karetu (what a coincidence I thought

I must stick that in a poem)

we’re going to spend Christmas there

this year (1997) for perhaps the last time

disturbing (like the state of the health system)

it will be Eileen’s first visit

Temuera’s second

Anne’s third

It will be somewhere in the thirties or forties

for me – most of the visits in my childhood

but my mother is from Karetu

and that is how I know the place

through all the stories she’s told me

like Grandpa Turi bringing a slab of icecream

back for the kids after the races on Saturday

about Nanny Pu who lived to be over a hundred

and only spoke Maori

about her mother’s hard life

or living in the country without a pair of shoes

milking the cows by hand before going to school

about the men and women of Karetu

and some of their terrible secrets

even I won’t tell

that’s why I go back because of my mother

who planted Karetu in me

not just because of my ancestors

buried in the cemetery and the cave nearby

whose waka navigated to the soil there

53

carved shaped loved floating totara

54 waka rorohiko

I heard it at Awataha Marae

in te reo – waka rorohiko –

‘computer waka’, about a database

containing whakapapa. Some tapu

information, not for publication.

A dilemma for the library culture

of access for all, no matter who, how,

why. A big Western principle stressing

egalitarianism. My respects.

However, Maori knowledge brings many

together to share their passed down wisdom

in person to verify their inheritance;

without this unity our collective knowledge

dissipates into cults of personality.

55 Araiteuru

The crew of this waka, touched by daylight,

turned to stone up and down the east coast

of the South Island – some became mountains,

Mt Torlesse, Mt Somers, Mt Tasman, Mt Cook –

forests, ranges, pillars and hills. Of course

I am translating names here. A hill in this part

of the country, for example, would probably

be taller than Auckland’s Mt Eden, which

is roughly as tall as the Sky Tower