as ancestors. The Pacific was a far-flung society

- waka, cocooned in Aotearoa,

stopped returning to Hawaiiki, dropped their sails,

clambered overland into rivers, burrowed

into mountains, reefs, flew into words

sung at tangi, polished speeches,

seen by the paua eyes of gods and ancestors

whose real eyes, blinking in the light

of their lives millennia and centuries ago,

saw the vehicles themselves –

spacecraft, oxygen tanks, caravans led by elephants,

vehicles of concept, exploration, sails a vortex

ribbed by people shouting names down into the Great Sea.

Waka 63 Venus

Point this poem to Kopua.

Please memorise it.

Waka 64

i

It’s no irony that Waitangi means

crying waters, water of tears –

they pour from a height

their source as mysterious as the Nile’s

mixed blood

adrenalin salt on skin

often my people’s

although the individual owners

are beyond a DNA trace

while the drops of Waitangi

are mixed with rain

ii

they row the Waitangi waka

on Waitangi Day (which keeps

the theme of this sequence –

a waka or a star or ocean

in each poem)

Waka 65

He kakano i ruia mai i Rangiatea.

When the waka congregate at the high temple

of Taputapuatea, in Rangiatea,

when our priests are gathered

and permissions granted to proceed,

we will piece together our intelligence

from the two thousand year mission –

compare the methods, materials,

languages of the enterprise.

A great living Library of people,

trillions of brain cells indexed

from the heart, cross-referenced

through usefulness to life, powered

by the stuff of life itself. Among

these cells lie references to waka,

to waka ritual, methods of navigation,

knowledge of stars currents wind –

the great gathering place of spirits,

Te Hono i Wairua, represents

this knowledge – for after death

we know where to find Hawaiiki –

the living send them here

without directions.

Waka 66 Hokule‘a

Masts flute sails out to mouth shapes

like beaks of taniwha coming from the sea

the only hint of people the rigging

sweeping like vines from the canopy

of Tane’s domain – they draw on the ocean

like taniwha straws whose sails

are taniwha gills in the breeze

while the prow (you know, the taniwha nose)

points home like an instinct as magnetic

as the grip of the people

on this taniwha’s back

Waka 67 from We the Navigators

Boobies, noddies, terns – these and other birds

indicate the presence of land, most particularly

in the early morning and the evening when

they return home. They fly straight

to their perches. Some birds come out at night

to explore the waka. Depending

on the species you can rely on them for up

to fifty miles out. It’s well documented

in the Pacific that frigate birds were used

to find land, and even as messenger birds

across islands. They’d get a feed of fish

at the other perch. Before writing, the messages

came in the form of pearls. Birds save lives.

Gatty wrote survival books based on bird sightings

for airmen forced down at sea: his Raft Book for instance,