Look closely at the narration. Who

is holding the sails taut, commanding the paddles,

seeing that the carvings follow the patterns

of waka that follow the patterns of the sea?

I. Odysseus. I have put myself here

because this is a text. A very Western text.

The navigators sail with me now.

I sail as a member of the crew,

and can speak for them.

Waka 89

Yo I’m Maui. This facet is the Maui of the hauling.

The great fish is mine. I have first rights

and I am expressing anger ANGER ANGER

at being denied a significant portion of the text

of the Star Waka. The copyrights are mine.

Without me the waka would be a vaka for instance.

They wouldn’t have a base, a matrix to tie

their culture to. You know I fished the land up

don’t you? You know I placed it under the path

of Kopua, not far from Matariki, don’t you?

How else would anyone find it?

What do you mean there’d be another star,

or birds? I tell you I put it there because those stars

are the best ones in the sky. I want credit.

And no more anthropologists.

I belong to cosmology. Dig, Odysseus?

Waka 90 Te ao marama IV

This is my third appearance. I am

Kurahaupo Waka. This time

I have taken the task

of representing the two hundred

waka remembered by the people,

shot to the cold regions here

by accounts turned to legends,

such is the elevated nature of oral literature.

I have been appointed by the narrator.

I am unelected, as is the narrator.

My appearance here is strange,

without the adornments of my mana,

the finery of inlaid carved and seasoned wood,

the ceremonial decorations taking me

into the sea. It’s like journeying in a bathtub,

the margins of the sea of text

only released by the narrator’s dreams.

And he doesn’t write when he’s asleep.

But my mana isn’t in my physicality.

It’s in the psyche of the culture that bred me.

Waka 91 A Feast

i

Stones are laid beneath the pyres

till they encompass the heat which

feeds through the layers of bird flesh

root vegetables smoking and steaming

underground – a hundred birds

a thousand vegetables oiling

the throats of the waka community

licking sucking chewing biting

ha-ha

a feast of the season

ii

scraps for the slaves

are heaped like atolls

rain makes goblets of their faces

Waka 92

I am an island

in the people’s consciousness

storms foretell arrival of waka

carrying companies of strange birds

strangled by the breeze

each triangulation of sails

tells of trouble in the colonies

a fleet and there has been a great calamity

for I am an island of death

waka are hearses not vehicles for exploration

I gladly take them

they send the loved ones here

with some knowledge

of what it is to be a Maori

the others go to the other human place

called the collective unconscious

I am called Hawaiiki