Tuesday Poem: Afastina by Grace Teuila Evelyn Taylor

for Selina & Tusiata

Hey Afakasi
can your palangi hands do the brown siva?
can you Sāmoa siva a show and tell?
Island Monarchs
rebirth a longing for butterfly belongings
I used to hide unknown in their shame

Awkward siva
is my show and tell
I inherited this landscape of cultural monarchs
they whisper stories of missed belongings
white is my shame
for I am, Afakasi

Can you tell?
bowing to tulou for unsighted monarchs
claiming five senses for a sense of belongings
poetry to disguise the shame
speak Afakasi
let your words do the siva

She was known as a wanderer, before a butterfly monarch
black veins on wings atlas her belongings
casting aside her shame
she reclaimed this name Afakasi
dancing a sacred siva
the stories of taboo she can tell

Carving new belongings
no game of shame
she displays a whole Afakasi
quietly siva

share and tell
fluttering on the wings of monarchs

What is so shame
about being Afakasi?
beautifully awkward colourless siva
is the truth of how we tell
cultural monarchs
of newly carved belongings

So shame on the lies they tell
you; Afakasi are modern monarchs
stretch your siva wide, cast your belongings

Posted with permission
Editor: Robert Sullivan.

'Afastina' appears in Grace Taylor’s enormously satisfying debut poetry collection Afakasi Speaks, which was recently launched in Auckland and Wellington. The collection explores the poet’s Samoan and English heritage in an engaging, socially connected poetic. The poet is a co-founder of the South Auckland Poets Collective, and the Rising Voices youth poetry slam. She has also performed her work in the United States, and nationally.

The book is published by innovative Hawaiian publisher Ala Press. There will be a launch in Honolulu in December. Here is a link to the Amazon site for readers interested in purchasing the collection.

This week's editor, Robert Sullivan, is of Nga Puhi, Kai Tahu and Irish descent, and is a poet and academic. He has lived and worked in Hawai'i but teaches now at the School of Creative Writing MIT, Auckland. His most recent book is Cassino: City of Martyrs (Huia 2010). He blogs at Manu Korero: Talking Birds. 

After you've read and enjoyed Afastina, check out the sidebar for a cornucopia of poems chosen by our Tuesday Poets

He Has Superpowers by Daren Kamali

(for Munro te Whata)

He’s an unsung superhero
in the village

He can fly
breathe underwater
walk on hot lovo stones

No one knows his secret
except his soulmate
Duna
Grandmother Eel
who lives on the reef

He visits Duna on moonlit nights
when everyone is sound asleep
he swims out to sea

They talanoa about ancestors
and Vū
good and evil
ancient times

He wished he lived in those days
he would use his superpowers
to save his people from intruders
he’d fly over their islands
and drop hot lovo rocks like bombs
from the heavens
and cause tsunamis to drown their villages

It’s too late now
those times are long gone
he has no use for these powers nowadays

Bored with life
doesn’t even need food or water
eats and drinks anyway
hasn’t been sick in 20 years
still acts sick sometimes
so people think he’s human

15 years pass
still no one knows his secret
Duna is growing old
he’s getting younger
Soon people will question
how come he has no wrinkles?
No grey hairs after decades

His mother says:
“We going overseas next year son”
for a better future
more opportunities
all that jazz

What about Duna
he thinks to himself

That full moon night
he visits Grandmother Eel
with a heavy heart
he starts to explain what lies ahead

Mama says:
“We going overseas next year son”
He says:
“I wanna be with you, nana”
In a bubbly voice, Duna says:
“You must go my child
Do not worry about me, my time is drawing near”

Worried
Grandmother Eel is dying
Must help her
Needs to transfer his superpowers soon
but doesn’t know how?
Wishes someone could help him
Someone could show him how
Or
he just might
swim into the deep blue
with Grandmother Eel
find a safe place
where they can dwell
far from everything
far from humans
who don’t respect her dying body
Just Duna and him
till he figures out how to save her from dying
Who knows?
It may be
for eternity
he needs to decide
soon


                                       Editor: Robert Sullivan 

This oceanic poem comes from Daren Kamali’s first book Tales Poems and Songs from the Underwater World (Anahera Press). It is reproduced here with the poet’s permission.

I admire Kamali’s oceanic poetic relationships, reminding us of the many connections we have with all creation. His next book will be published by Honolulu-based Ala Press. Daren Kamali was the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer in Residence last year at the University of Hawaii. He is also one of the co-founders of the South Auckland Poets’ Collective.

This week's editor, Robert Sullivan, is of Nga Puhi, Kai Tahu and Irish descent, and is a poet and academic. He has lived and worked in Hawai'i but is back in NZ teaching at the School of Creative Writing MIT, Auckland. His latest book is Cassino: City of Martyrs (Huia 2010). He blogs at Manu Korero: Talking Birds. 

Once you've read the hub poem, please look to the sidebar and find another Tuesday Poem to read by or chosen by one of our thirty poets. 

Envelope by Anna Jackson

I stick a stamp on an envelope.
It is a lake, a little glassy, and a mountain, behind the lake.
A little bit of lake is left behind on my tongue.

I would not like to be a fish in that lake.
A little bit of me would always be going missing.
I would always be leaving the lake for the mountain.

And now, it is several days later.
I am waiting for a reply.
Then I see that the stamp is still attached to me.

So that explains my demonic energy lately!
That explains how I rose so high so fast,
what everyone means when they refer to my depth.

But where am I being sent?
And when I arrive, who will open me?
Roughly, with a finger, or gently, with a knife?

__________________
                                                    Editor: Robert Sullivan

I selected this poem because it is from a brilliant new collection, Thicket (AUP). Anna Jackson is influenced by Russian poetic traditions following the Bolshevik revolution (although its declared influence is Virgil), and so she often informs her writing with an edgy danger, in this instance contrasting the roughness of fingers with the genteel ‘knife'.

Without wishing to explain the poem, I admire the several figurative transformations: the narrator into an envelope, the lake into saliva on the narrator’s tongue in which a fish struggles. Later in the collection there is a poem called “The Fish and I” reminding me about its many internal cross-references, as well as to other poetics.

"Envelope" is published on Tuesday Poem with Anna Jackson's permission.

There is another of her Thicket poems and more about her here on  Tuesday Poem. 

To read more Tuesday Poems, look in the sidebar where up to 30 poets from NZ, Australia, the UK, the US and Italy post poems by themselves and others they admire. The poems go up all through a Tuesday - in the southern and northern hemispheres.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is poet Robert Sullivan of Maori (Ngā Puhi, Kai Tahu) and Galway Irish descent. He has won awards for his poetry, children's writing and editing. His most recent poetry collections:  Cassino City of Martyrs (Huia) and Shout Ha! to the Sky (Salt Publishing, UK). 

Robert co-edited NZ Book Award finalist Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri. He heads Creative Writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, and  blogs here. 

To Stuart by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Early spring, and a cold wet morning.      The wind mooches about outside,           planning a home invasion. It’s Mary’s birthday, our Mary whom      you’d have loved had the Fates           spared you. I take you back five years before you joined      the Maori Battalion, and six before you           died. I have many questions to put to you, many that may not even have      an answer. Why being blessed with           enviable gifts did you abandon your studies after only a year?      You could have made your mark           in any field that calls for passion and imagination.      As a boy I followed you about           from match to match marvelling at what you created with a       cricket ball. Your bowling           action and the flight of the ball, gathering speed as it flew      towards its target, were to me            a work of art. As an admiring younger brother, I celebrate      this image of what you promised           and never lived to fulfil. ‘Nature,’ wrote William Blake,      ‘has no Outline, but Imagination has.’           I see you turn and run up to the crease. I see your      arm swing over. I see the            ball in flight – and that is all.

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

I selected this poem because of its personal connection with the Maori Battalion, and my admiration for Alistair Te Ariki Campbell who was the first Polynesian poet to have a book published in English, the spectacularly successful Mine Eyes Dazzle (Pegasus Press, 1950, 1951, 1956) with an Oxford revised edition called Wild Honey in 1964.

Campbell’s brother Stuart (named in his ‘Personal Sonnets’ as 446853 Private S.A. Campbell) was killed as a result of ‘friendly fire’ in 1945 while waiting to cross the Santerno River near Massa Lombarda, Italy. An RAF Bomber tragically dropped a 500 pound bomb near Stuart’s D Company unit of the 28^th Maori Battalion. The poem shows the younger brother’s admiration for Stuart, and the tremendous promise that was never realized in Stuart whose sharpness of mind and athleticism is captured in the poignant image of the cricket ball in flight that never lands.

Campbell was continuously revising. In a previously published version of the poem the quote from Blake in the penultimate ‘stanza’ uses ‘Art’ rather than this most recent version which uses ‘Imagination’. It’s a revealing re-vision, emphasizing a five-senses aesthetic rather than the highly abstract term art. The quote also grounds Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s poem in Blake’s English tradition of visionary poetry, while keeping it in the same field of play as cricket, and the promises of university study “…that calls for passion and imagination.” It also shows Campbell’s tremendous artistry, continuing to reshape work well after it was first published.

There are technical aspects to notice. I put stanza in inverted quotes above because the poem moves in eleven stanza-like tercets. The tercet pattern:  the first line far-left, the second line indented, then the third line further indented, cleverly creates small spaces in the long-flowing lyric, or ‘spots in time’ during the bowler’s run-up and then release. The maestro also lays a regular pattern of three stresses per line, creating a sweet or dolce music when speaking of his deceased brother.

Campbell returned and returned to the theme of his brother’s death, perhaps beginning with his famous 1948-49 sequence ‘Elegy’ which mourned his friend the mountain climber Roy Dickson’s death, but  contains an edge of familial grief conjuring his brother’s recent death; through to the 1960 ‘Personal Sonnets I’, 1964’s ‘Grandfather Bosini’ who calls out for Maireriki (Stuart’s Tongarevan name) and then dies, and the 2001 Maori Battalion sequence where this poem “To Stuart” first appeared. An enduring theme of the orphaned Campbell’s poetry was family, and his yearning to re-connect with them.

More on Alistair Te Ariki Campbell here and here. The poem is posted with the kind permission of Andrew Campbell.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is poet Robert Sullivan of Maori (Ngā Puhi, Kai Tahu) and Galway Irish descent. He has won several NZ literary awards for his poetry, children's writing and editing. His poetry collections include Star Waka, Captain Cook in the Underworld, Voice Carried My Family, and his most recent: Cassino City of Martyrs (Huia) and Shout Ha! to the Sky (Salt Publishing, UK). 


Robert co-edited Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri. Robert is the new Head of the School of Creative Writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, and before that, directed Creative Writing at the University of Hawai'i.  He blogs here.