your tongue, your eyes, your frightening tears
your giggle, your toughness, your smile
your shudder, your sardonic forbearing, your sudden sweat
your stoopid, your brave terror, your
your body where I dip my chipped cup
like a despairing pilgrim
ah ‘my’ beautiful golden girl of the Sixties
mother of my sons, your tired
lovely body where I bring my terminal need
where I stoop with cracked shaking lips
beatup puppydog cock, sad smile
& pounding heart, saying Show me again
this everyday miracle
how you bring forth such floods of seed from a fool
(1984)
Leigh Davis, from Willy’s Gazette
years rising in the early morning
as anonymous dancers like croci
yellow and blue with round thighs
and small wrists these cutouts
pacing endlessly over the background,
dans les magasins/it’s very artistic downtown.
says Willy, carrying his thoughts like a
pubblicazione about unfurled but
manifold as bonbons paper is bliss
the way it curves back the magazine a
strange warehouse behind enemy lines,
these ideas (but my fear of reading, Giovanni,
when Jamayca is in the library) a cache ..
de novo, le pa-twah de l’oiseaux
(1983)
Janet Charman, ‘two deaths in one night’
in each side room
a body
dropped in the sheets
after long pain
and a look of tense
hectic
between breath
fright
we were going to a rugby party
after work
that night
how we washed their bodies
i took down the cotside
and cut away
the drip
old dressings
and the oxygen mask
Jean said
i’ll wash
you hold
i held
the dull blank weight
against warm me
his unknown soldier chin
propped up finally
and we found a bit of carnation
to stick between
his tied together hands
this was just
the first one
across the hall
we started on the other
how we washed his body
had to laugh
in the low light of
sister’s
office
sipping tea
waiting for the orderlies
to load their long white parcels away
on cold trolleys
All that shit
I don’t know how you girls can
Do it
says the lock forward
brushing his finger into what he hopes is my breast
Come down the beach with us—
we went
two deaths in one night
(1987)
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, from ‘Soul Traps’
I A Stranger from Rakahanga
A stranger has arrived from Rakahanga.
Nobody knows how he came:
no strange canoe has been reported—
none could survive in such a sea.
Our villages are awash, and our dead groan
as they sit up to the chin in water.
Such a stranger, you would think, would be
so singular, so arresting,
once seen, nobody could forget him.
Nobody remembers a single thing—
the look on his face (if he has a face),
his size, or if he is young or old.
He arrived, some say, a few hours ago,
others claim it is more than a week,
since he was first seen at Omoka.
On one thing, though, all are agreed:
he is a traveller from Rakahanga—
but why Rakahanga, they can’t say.
They stand around in silent groups, expecting
the worst—but not a thing happens.
No deaths or accidents are reported.
They will turn soon to urgent tasks, repair
the storm damage, but strangely empty
as if nursing a disappointment.
II Sina
You were a tender girl, Sina,
fragrant as the komuko
of the young coconut tree.
Throughout our adolescence
our entire universe
was the bottom of a canoe
where we lay together
drifting among the motu.
Every night I would pluck
for your breasts and hair
the flowers of the sky.
And then one night
we drifted far from shore
through the scented darkness,
oblivious of the reef
until too late—aue!
Now you are a woman
lovelier even than the girl
that loved me long ago,
and another lover
drinks from your calabash.
Ru the fisherman
knows all the secret places
in the ocean floor.
His spear is probing
for an answer.
I watch and wait.
XIV Solomono
To die is simply to walk
away from the body
without regret or pain,
and with no thought of
turning back, for there is
nothing to turn back to,
except the empty shell
that relatives weep over.
I have often left
my body here at Te Tautua,
crossed the lagoon and
walked among my sleeping
kinsfolk at Omoka to see
if all was well.
My family know my door
must be kept open
if I am to rejoin my body,
but sometimes through
carelessness they have
almost shut me out.
Now it is time to go,
to walk the steep track
to Savaiki alone. I have
enjoined my dear ones
to close my door firmly
after me, when I leave
on my last visit to Omoka.
They weep, but will obey.
(1985)
Lauris Edmond, ‘The Names’
Six o’clock, the morning still and
the moon up, cool profile of the night;
time small and flat as an envelope—
see, you slip out easily: do I know you?
Your names have still their old power,
they sing softly like voices across water.
Virginia Frances Martin Rachel Stephanie
Katherine—the sounds blend and chant
in some closed chamber of the ear, poised
in the early air before echoes formed.
Suddenly a door flies open, the music
breaks into a roar, it is everywhere;
now it’s laughter and screaming, the crack
of a branch in the plum tree, the gasping
and blood on the ground; it is sea-surge
and summer, ‘Watch me!’ sucked under
the breakers; the hum of the lupins, through
sleepy popping of pods the saying of names.
And all the time the wind that creaked in
the black macrocarpas and whined in the wires
was waiting to sweep us away; my children who
were my blood and breathing I do not know you:
we are friends, we write often, there are
occasions, news from abroad. O
ne of you is dead.
I do not listen fearfully for you in the night,
exasperating you with my concern,
I scarcely call this old habit love—
yet you have come to me this white morning,
and remind me that to name a child is brave,
or foolhardy; even now it shakes me.
The small opaque moon, wafer of light,
grows fainter and disappears; but
the names will never leave me, I hear
them calling like boatmen far over
the harbour at first light. They will sound
in the dreams of your children’s children.
(1980)
Sam Hunt, ‘Requiem’
They say ‘the lighthouse-keeper’s world is round’—
The only lighthouse keeper that I know
Inhabits space, his feet well clear of ground.
I say he is of light, of midnight snow.
That other lighthouse keeper—he they say
Whose world is round—is held responsible
For manning his one light by night; by day,
For polishing his lenses, bulb and bell.
My man, my friend who lately leaves, is quite
Another type. He climbs no spiral stairs:
But go he does, for good, to man the night;
To reappear, among his polished stars.
(1980)
Suburban Gothic
Owen Marshall, ‘Mumsie and Zip’
Mumsie saw the car coming at five, as she had expected. The general noise of homeward traffic was at a distance; but still the desperation was apparent in the pitch of it. Zip always turned off the engine when in the gate, and coasted on the concrete strips until he was parallel with the window. The grass was spiky and blue in the poor light of winter. Mumsie had cacti on the window sill, and the dust lay amid the thorns of Mammillaria wildii.
Zip undid his seat belt, and stepped out. He took the orange, nylon cover from the boot, and began covering the car for the night. He spread the cover evenly before he began to tie it down. Zip always started at the same corner and worked clockwise round the car. He didn’t bend to tie the corners as a woman would bend, with backside out, but crouched agile and abrupt, balanced on his toes. Sometimes when Mumsie was close to him when he crouched like that she would hear his knees pop. Mumsie wondered if there would be a day when she would go out and ask Zip not to cover the car because there was something of significance she had to attend: a premiere perhaps, or an apparently trivial summons which would become This Is Your Life, Mumsie.
Mumsie knew Zip wouldn’t look up as he came past the window: they always reserved recognition for the kitchen when Zip came home from work. Zip would go to the lavatory, and then to their bedroom to take off his jacket and shoes. Mumsie heard him flush the bowl, and go through for his other shoes. Zip came to the stove. He stood by Mumsie’s shoulder. ‘How’s things,’ he said. The mist of the winter evening was strung through the poles and gables; the thinning hair of a very old woman. Toby McPhedron tried to kick free a flattened hedgehog from the surface of the road.
‘Fine,’ said Mumsie. ‘And you?’
‘Busy as usual,’ said Zip. ‘Just the same, Mumsie. You know how it is.’
‘Casserole,’ said Mumsie as Zip lifted the lid, ‘with the onions in chunks the way you like it. Chunky chunks instead of sliced up thin.’
‘Good on you, Mumsie, good on you,’ said Zip. ‘You know what I like all right.’ He rubbed his forehead and circled the sockets of his eyes.
‘So the usual day?’ said Mumsie.
‘You know how it is. Busy of course; always the same.’
‘So Mumsie’s got a casserole,’ said Mumsie.
‘You know I like a casserole all right,’ said Zip. Mumsie noticed how the pupils of his eyes jittered the way they often did, although his face was flat and still. He stood beside her and looked at the casserole while his pupils jittered.
‘You know I couldn’t get hardly a thing to dry today. There’s no wind and no sun. Hardly a thing dried. I had to take most of it off the line again and put it in the good room with the heater.’
‘It’s that sort of day,’ said Zip. He placed the butter and salt and pepper on the table, and cork mats with the picture of a kitten halting a ball of fluffy wool.
‘Mr Beresford died,’ said Mumsie.
‘Mr Beresford?’
‘The place with the new roof; two down from the corner. I heard Mrs Rose talking about it in the shop.’
‘Ah,’ said Zip.
‘So nothing of interest at work today.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Zip. He sat down at his place, which was facing the stove and the bench. He laid his hands one each side of his cork mat, as a knife and fork are laid.
‘They haven’t found the murderer yet,’ said Mumsie.
‘Murderer?’
‘Who murdered those two girls in the boatshed in Auckland. Shaved their heads I think it said. There’s a lot of sick things.’
Zip left his hands resting on the table and he looked at the floor by the bench where the pattern on the lino had been worn away. Mumsie’s legs plodded this way and that around the kitchen, but always came back to that worn place, on which she shuffled back and forth from stove to table to bench. Zip seemed absorbed: as if that worn patch were a screen and Mumsie’s splayed shoes played out some cryptic choreography. But his black eye spots continued to jiggle, and the focus wasn’t quite right to hit the worn lino, but aimed deeper, at something behind. Zip sat still, as if conserving energy for a final effort, or as if that final effort had been made to no avail. Mumsie looked at him from time to time. ‘Mumsie’s done peas shaken in the pot with butter,’ she said, ‘and baked potatoes in their skins.’
‘You’re a winner, Mumsie, that’s for sure.’
Tears began to form on the windows, and the light outside was fading quickly. ‘I like to be in my own house when it gets dark,’ said Zip. They could hear persistent traffic noise from the corner, and Toby McPhedron ran a stick along the tin fence next door.
‘You don’t mind about the heater on in the good room?’ said Mumsie. ‘There’s no drying at all.’
‘We can go there ourselves later,’ said Zip. ‘We’d have to heat one room.’
‘Now why would the murderer shave those girls’ heads?’ said Mumsie.
‘Kinky sex, Mumsie. You want to watch out.’ Zip watched his casserole with the chunky onions being served, and the potatoes blistered grey-brown, and the peas in butter glistening as emeralds.
Mumsie talked about Mrs Rose’s visit to the dentist, about the manner of Mr Beresford’s dying third hand, about the boatshed murderer and the good room doorknob which just came off in her hand. The tears made tracks down the windows, and those tracks showed black, or spangled back the kitchen light. Mumsie talked of a party at the Smedley’s which they weren’t invited to, and how either a niece or a cousin of Debbie Simpson’s had a growth in her ear which might be pressing on her brain. Zip said, ‘Is that right, Mumsie,’ and nodded his head to show that he was listening, and in satisfaction as he crunched the casserole onions done in chunks as he liked them: and he kept looking at things deeper than the worn lino by the bench. Mumsie wondered if she should take some pikelets along to Mrs Beresford, or whether she would only be thought nosey because she hadn’t really known him. A dog had torn Mrs Jardine’s rubbish bag open again, and Mrs Jardine had to clean it up in her good clothes when she came home at lunchtime, Mumsie said.
The winter night, the lizard voice of the traffic at a distance, the condensation on the windows, all intensified the artificial light of the kitchen where Mumsie and Zip ate their casserole, until it was a clear, yellow space separate from the rest of life; independent even from the rest of their own experience, and isolating them there—Mumsie and Zip.
‘Mumsie,’ said Zip, ‘now that was a real casserole, and don’t worry about the doorknob, because I can get that bastard back on la
ter.’
‘I knew you’d like it, being winter and that. And there’ll be enough for you tomorrow.’
Zip lit a cigarette as he stood by the bench and waited to help with the dishes. He pulled the smoke in, and his eyelids dropped for a moment as the smoke hit deep in his lungs. In a long sigh he breathed out. The smoke drifted, the colour of the condensation on the window, and Zip had the tea-towel folded over his arm like a waiter and stood before the plastic drip tray as he waited for the dishes. ‘I’ll put the rest of the casserole in something else,’ said Mumsie, ‘and then the dish can be soaked. There’s always some bubbles out and bakes on the rim.’
‘Let it soak then, Mumsie,’ said Zip.
‘Don’t let me miss the start of the news. Maybe they’ve found the boatshed murderer.’ Mumsie liked everyone to be brought to justice. Zip dried the forks carefully, pressing a fold of towel between the prongs. He tapped the ash from his cigarette into Chamaecereus silvestrii on the sill.
‘It’s just as well we’re not in the boatshed belt,’ he said.
‘But it could be anyone, Zip.’
‘Except Mr Beresford, Mumsie. I’d say he must be in the clear.’
‘No, I meant it could be any woman. It said on the talkback that these things are increasing all the time.’
Zip spread the tea-towel over the stove top, and shuffled the cork mats into symmetry so that the images of the kittens and the wool were in line. He stood by Mumsie as she wiped the table, and then he sat there and put down a plastic ash tray. Mumsie told him not to pick at the contact because it was already tatty, so Zip rotated his cigarette packet instead; standing it alternately on end and side, over and over again. His fingers were nimble, and the packet only whispered on the table as it turned. ‘We’ll go through to the good room soon,’ said Mumsie, ‘seeing the clothes are already in front of the heater there.’
‘That’s right,’ said Zip. He sighed, and the smoke came like dust from deep in his lungs, and drifted in the yellow light. ‘Another day another dollar,’ he said.
‘Just another day, you said.’
‘That’s right. Another day,’ said Zip. He tapped with his finger on the cigarette above the ash tray; a column of ash fell neatly and lay like a caterpillar.
‘How many of those have you had today?’ asked Mumsie.
‘Five or six.’
‘Mumsie’s going to have to hide them, or you’ll be up to a packet a day again.’
‘You’re a tough lady all right,’ said Zip.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 105