POETRY

Kaea, Issue 5, 1 February 1981, Page 26

POETRY

Vernice Wineera Pere (Ngati Toa) works with the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii. This poem is one of several which won her first place in the poetry competition for the 1980 South Pacific Festival of Arts held in Papua New Guinea.

The representatives gather in council. They are the new chiefs knowing the new ways, the new needs. That they could forget the old is unforgiveable. But the new demands recognition, confrontation, and courage born of great deeds. The new chiefs will meet the new face to face and in the new way discuss the issues at hand. They will plan expenditures and stand to disapprove the disregard of invisible nets twohundred miles from land. They will lament the loss of language splintered among islands scattered like fallen leaves on the sea. They will protest the pollution of an atmosphere of aroha by capitalism’s insidious cloud of greed. They will be freed from the sale of ancient birthrights, the jail of modernity. The new chiefs will meet the new face to face, and prevail. Vernice Wineera Pere

PATTERNS

They carried my ancestors ashore taught them to make a raupo hut smoked pipes on their doorstep. They sang us their waiata taught us about Ruahine and Ruataniwha taught us to heed the tapu, and I cannot follow the white line which does not see the taniko woven on the water the moko on the tree trunks the koru of my mind.

Lois Burleigh

YOUR SURE WA YS

I can see your ways in these waters:* warm, inviting here, dark and secretive there; at each instance a peculiar charm, as though the hardy shores with rippled care, taste of a goodness, lend it to the trees. The air, delectable, tantalizing, unblended potency, keeps all one sees unsullied, definite unimposing. And when the sun goes down, leaving velvet shades and grey tones to mingle, the ripple incessant, it has me wondering you let all bias colour beliefs and people. Your sure ways were of one I’ve never known, cultivating what you loved as your own.

Robin Kora

*Waikaremoana

A THOUGHT

A thought is different from a poem. It crawls up your legs, Then right up your spine, It creeps over your shoulder like the sun coming up,

Then on silent haunches it walks down your hand And your write it.

Aroha Harris (Ngapuhi) St Joseph’s Maori Girls College