Liz Mortonius at Poetry Live.

Elizabeth Morton is a poet, yarn teller, and researcher of the noggin. Her writing has been published in the likes of Landfall, Takahē, Poetry Aotearoa, and also in overseas journals such as the Moth Magazine, Rattle, Narrative Magazine and Smokelong Quarterly. She is always the bridesmaid, never the bride, as is evidenced by twice placing second in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and also second in the Sargeson Prize. She has four poetry collections, the latest being Incident Report (Otago University Press, 2026). She likes humming David Bowie hits while walking the streets.

Little Sister Buddha

It is Thursday morning
and there are five monks on the dais.
I cannot understand a word they are chanting
but I get the gist

And Mr Oh as supplicant and translator
He fights with two swords
as is the local custom
You were his best student
in a long time

‘I view her as my sister’ he says
‘I will make an altar for her in my house.’

And my nephews at my shoulder,
‘Shall we do a haka here uncle?’
It’s tempting but I’m not sure
what the Buddha would make of it

This is the first of your funerals
in absentia at Chalong in a temple
with you on the first leg home via Bangkok
where you will lie for one day alone
in a city of 10 million reincarnations
before flying Emirates

Five monks wish you appropriate karma.
They do not care much for the body
in these parts.
They have more concern for the travel of the soul

We should not linger
near the site of your collision
but there are offerings by a mango tree
and so,
we must

.

We haka by a lake
as fish and birds and turtles are
released and you are left
to dream of your first pro fight
yours in the third round
TKO with ten elbows
brutal
magnanimous
rire
rire
hau pai mārire

The good and gentle wind.
Some of the ancestors thought it made them
bulletproof.
Uncle Taka wants your photo
for the Whare at Pōhara

You are tupuna now

There’s a nice one of you in braids
and fighting strip
You look strong
resolute
calm
Or the one when you were ten
holding the giant rabbit you saved
from drowning in the flood of 82

Same look

And as I reminisce
a man trips over his own dog right
outside my window
I wonder what the monks would say about that

In Memoriam
Ariana Brown
1972 – 2016

Ben Brown, 2016
from This Imperfect Light, Dead Bird Books, 2026

Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Korokī, Ngāti Pāoa) is an award-winning children’s author, poet and freelance writer. He has written over twenty children’s books as well as short stories for children and adults, general non-fiction, memoir, freelance articles and reviews. His poetry has been published in various anthologies around the world, and in May 2021 he was made the inaugural Aotearoa Reading Ambassador for Children – Te Awhi Rito. He is also a father of two, which he considers his best work to date.

Mrs Field

I think I would have failed if it were not
for my dear bird, who talked unceasingly,
his cage upon my shoulder. By the sea
were miles of grassy dunes; no shade. The lot
of all our worldly goods my husband got
into a heavy swag; the pots for tea,
our bedding and our clothes. Strapped onto me
my son was bundled like a native tot.
The week-long walk it seemed that every wind
on earth was passing here – a constant threat.
My body sheltered boy and parrot both.
The sand abraded me till I felt skinned
alive. Come evening, we’d make camp, and with
a stick I’d dig up grubs to feed my pet.

Airini Beautrais
from Whanganui River Poems, VUP

This poem is from Flow: Whanganui River Poems, a book-length sequence in three parts. The third part of the sequence is written in various sonnet forms, in the voices of different characters from the ancient to recent past, fictional and real. The Fields were a real family who travelled from Wellington to Whanganui, up the coast, in the 19^th century before roads were built. Anyone who knows this coast will know it is wild, windswept, and involves a lot of river crossings, some of which claimed lives in the days of foot and horse travel. The diction in this poem is deliberately dated, and perhaps jarring to a modern ear, but I wanted the whole collection to feel suffused with the voices of ghosts. The thing I like the most about this story is that they did this week-long walk with their pet parrot, which Mrs Field carried in a cage. I don’t know what kind of parrot it was. I think I made up the part about the grubs. There is a beetle, the sand scarab, that lives in the sand as a larvae, and is quite easy to find if you dig.

I realised recently that there is a lot of wind in my poetry, and that it always signifies some kind of ominous mood or emotional disturbance. I find wind irritating and always feel anxious when there are strong gales blowing. I think that underneath the story of Mrs Field, there is also the emotion of the writer. I was going through some challenging life events at the time of writing this collection, and a lot of my sonnets were about shipwrecks. There was something cathartic about writing about history in poetry, using the sonnet forms, and exploring the raw emotional potential behind these stories.

Throughout this section, which is called ‘The Moving Sand’ I wanted the feeling of disembodied voices, washed up like driftwood on the beaches of Castlecliff and South Beach at the mouth of the awa. In the first part of Flow, I focused on Pākehā settlers appropriating Māori land and cutting down native forests: it was people against environment. In this section, the environment shapes people. In the future, we will have to reckon more and more with the forces of nature as extreme weather events intensify. Some of the other poems in Flow deal with climate change and an increase in the likelihood of devastating floods. Nature is all about balance: when we push nature too far, nature pushes back.