follows this. Meaning is food for chiefs.

Succulent hearts steaming in hot ovens

of earth. The land fortified a thousand

years with our blood. We grew tall here. We must

reclaim gifts of mouth, example. Faces

must drink in faces, lap up, ripple, splash

each other. Make moko in the wrinkles,

warriors for ourselves, for our people,

leaping from pits into bright daylight

defying the culture of the death

of our culture. Spray out its narrative

with whakairo. In many places

we share ancestry, jokes, communities

of spirit grown up over settlement –

and so this waka has passed its

thousandth line, Maori and Pakeha,

stars, knowledge of places only referred –

but only lines glide here on salt water,

come out in commanding the stroke – again,

stroke again, stroke, stroke, stroke again, again …

Waka 57 El Nino Waka

Among the compasses of navigators –

star compass, wind compass, solar compass –

a compass based on currents, such was

the reliability of the sea. Today the sea

is unreliable. Whatever the reason

for El Nino – deforestation of North and South America,

for example – El Nino has burst into the sea

as rapidly as it has burst into our popular culture

and our livelihoods: droughts and floods and storms

around the rim of the Pacific, the great fluid

of the compass a-bubble with this burst artery.

I can see its origins, as you can. Lack

of respect for the planet. The planet, as you are aware,

is not only our mother, but the mother of all

living creatures here, from the latest computer virus

to the greatest of the primates. She carries us

through the universe. These things

are simple, something that human beings

have known throughout their human beingness,

which we know is brief compared to our mother’s being.

El Nino is blood from our mother. She bleeds

internally, then from ocean into air in a maelstrom.

Then we send people with cameras: to show lakes

turn to mud, to show a tower or a field of cane

snap in a hurricane. I don’t have any answers

for El Nino. I am too small. These words

are too affected by El Nino to possess

any objectivity at all.

Waka 58 Waitangi Day

Our organic milk carton’s expiry date

is 6 February 1998. A found poem

sent by one of the gods of the harvest,

slipped unsuspectingly into my Foodtown trolley

by Haumietiketike perhaps? just like bumping

into an artist in the Grey Lynn aisles late at night,

swapping notes about our 21-month-old daughters –

another found poem. To think at the time

I didn’t see 6 February being scanned

at the checkout, getting stuck in a plastic bag,

being jostled along with the rest of the groceries.

And what about all the other dates, the possible

found poems on consumables – Easter on the honey,

2001 a space odyssey on the noodles,

Jim Morrison’s birthday on the candles?

What a far reach 6 February has,

all the way to the waka navigators