It is to do with tree ferns: mamaku, ponga, wheki. Shelter under here is so easily understood.
You can see that trees know how it is to be bound into the earth and how it is to rise defiantly into the sky.
It is to do with death: the great slip in the valley: when there is nothing left but to postpone all travel and wait in the low gut of the gully for water, wind and seeds.
It is to do with waiting. Shall we wait with trees, shall we wait with, for, and under trees since of all creatures they know the most about waiting, and waiting and slowly strengthening, is the great thing in grief, we can do?
It is always bleak at the beginning but trees are calm about nothing which they believe will give rise to something flickering and swaying as they are: so lucid is their knowledge of green.
Dinah Hawken from Peace and Quiet, THWUP, 2026
Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and has worked as a student counsellor and writing teacher at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Of her ten collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. A recent poetry collection is Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France (2024), and other recent collections include Sea-light (2021), Her most recent collection is Peace and Quiet (2026) Dinah lives in Paekākāriki.
The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.
For the first time ever Poetry Shelf is offering an open invitation to submit poems. I invite you to submit poems to a celebration of Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa |NZ Music Month 2026. The blog doesn’t usually offer open submissions!
Send a poem or two, unpublished or previously published is fine.
The poems will offer links to NZ music. Maybe subtle links, maybe a clear spotlight on performances, albums, past or present experiences, music anecdotes, memorable occasions. Over to you.
I will select some and create a music celebration post.
It’s a quick turn around and have no idea if it will work!
i AM the Māori Jesus And i don’t like mussels and parāoa Give me fish ‘n’ chips with tomato sauce Fresh white bread and loads of butter Butter makes this country great So feed my whenua to the cows for all i care
My father Hōhepa worked at Watties where they made the sauce at least until redundancy Now mother Mere works behind the bar at the Metropol Hotel and does some cleaning in the mornings
And you will know me by my Kēnana hair and my wrap-around sunnies whose eyes you cannot see But trust me they have seen my other Father’s light and not been blinded
So i can say that i have met the Devil personally and been tempted by his retinue of sweet-mouthed whores and silver salesmen dripping promises of Mammon and extravagance
Yet underneath his snakeskin smile he wears a bland suit of a nondescript shade that fits him quite well and he spends his days conducting secretaries who write infringement notices demanding restitution
And i have been up to the temple where i met the moneychangers who offered me a competitive rate of interest and a little pink plastic pig to put my shrapnel in and fee rebates and a free holiday in the Republic of Fiji to go with my Visa card and my mortgage
But my other Father’s house has many mansions and i don’t pay no rent so i don’t need no mortgage and anyway the bankers turned out to be wankers who didn’t know their numbers But all that imaginary money went into somebody’s pocket Sure as Arabs own oil and your arse points downhill and Mom & Dad America got foreclosure sales and dead kids in the desert but STILL THEY BELIEVE
Meanwhile there’s a whale needs saving up near Kaikōura but the bros got there before DOC did and they ate the bugger back at the marae like so many loaves and fishes They made taonga whakairo carved treasures from his teeth and bones So honouring the beast and showing its true worth
i shot up in a filthy flat with a skinhead panel beater junky who had his own name tattooed on his dick that you could only read when he was hard The implication being he was hard when the needle bit the flesh and spelled BARABBAS i sold him the last taste of his life and saved his junky soul in doing so
i lay down with a wahine named Mary Ah sweet Mary So many Marys and not enough time to lie down with them all And don’t get Freudian on me now though she does bear
some small resemblance to my mother given grace And bless her anyway Her willingness to suffer all the rage of Men Yet freely shed her tears with love upon my tired feet
i walked the roads i raised a deadman from the street beneath a tree where pigeons routinely shat upon him dead or alive i shared his bottle afterwards drank a cheap toast to his life before he told me to piss off But before you go boy give me back my bottle
It don’t matter eh Coz i got my brothers around me My apostles twelve in all or maybe thirteen i dunno Been a while since i counted but we’re a righteous crew Staunch as Patched up Yo-fuckin-yo-bro
i got Jake the muss and Tū the freezing worker and Billy T James in a black shearer’s singlet i got Hone Tuwhare now there’s a man who likes his mussels i got a Rastaman from up the coast
i got several of his brothers, hell i got the horses they rode in on i got a slick-suited lawyer from the city and i even got you Hēmi Every crowd needs a doubter
So you won’t catch me walking on Wellington Harbour mate Too bloody cold and windy eh and too many bureaucrats pushing compliance with occupational safety and health regulations
Na not me man i’m off up north with the bros to the Hokianga Choice dak eh and a nice place forever to leave from Warmer too bro
Ben Brown
“First publication of I am the Māori Jesus was on a CD I recorded in 2009, for Dogtown. I performed it for two or three years before recording. I recorded Dogtown with Creative NZ funding. It was a 5 track CD with beats recorded independently as Fly on the wall productions. Had fun doing that.” Ben Brown
Michele Leggott Plays Favourites
What is the time of a poem? Or, rather, how many times does it have? When Ben Brown walked to the front of the Old Government House lounge in Auckland in 2010, his signature poem ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ was already well on the way to becoming part of the long conversation that is Aotearoa New Zealand poetry.
The occasion was PHANTOMS AT LOUNGE, a collaboration between the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) and Phantom Billstickers, organised by the late Jim Wilson to launch another edition of his poem posters. Ben was part of the line-up that read poem posters for poets, local and international, who couldn’t make it to the event. Then he launched into ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ and his Auckland audience — students, poets, musicians and general hangers-on — sat up and tuned into the extraordinary echo chamber Ben was creating right in front of us:
“You can’t get through a poetry gig in Aotearoa without some kind of Baxter buzz so this is mine. On the Writers’ Walk in Wellington are cement words facing the sea from the Baxter poem that begins:
‘I saw the Maori Jesus Walking on Wellington Harbour. He wore blue dungarees. His beard and hair were long. His breath smelt of mussels and paraoa. When he smiled it looked like the dawn.’
And they are some beautiful words for a good Catholic white boy from Otago with Māori sensitivities. The only problem I have with them you see is:
i AM the Māori Jesus And i don’t like mussels and parāoa Give me fish ‘n’ chips with tomato sauce Fresh white bread and loads of butter Butter makes this country great So feed my whenua to the cows for all i care”
Lyttelton poet and performer Ben Brown (Ngāti Paoa, Ngāti Mahuta), takes on the poem James K Baxter published only once in his lifetime, in a little magazine in 1966, opening a dialogue between Pākehā observer and Māori subject that looks straight back at the Jesus figure Baxter posits and which Ben rejects. Detail by detail the younger poet takes apart Baxter’s water-walking Christ and his mission among the urban down and out, putting in its place a different lived experience.
There is humour, cockiness, and harder truths than Baxter was prepared to entertain. Nevertheless Ben’s poem, in the words of Paula Green, jams with Baxter’s from the moment its speaker declares ‘i AM the Māori Jesus / And i don’t like / mussels and parāoa’. It brings on board Alan Duff’s Jake the Muss and Apirana Taylor’s Tū the freezing worker; Billy T James and Hone Tuwhare (‘now there’s a man who likes his mussels’). It might even loop in McCahon’s enormous ‘I AM’ canvas, Victory Over Death 2, with its wall-hung words to walk past and wonder at.
In 1966 Baxter couldn’t know he was already on the road that would lead to Jerusalem and the commune he founded there three years later. But his poem knows, and Ben certainly knows, and that is why the later poem heads up north to a home place on a harbour that is the equivalent of a long drive up the Whanganui River.
‘I am the Māori Jesus’ is the kind of poem you don’t want to end. It’s rich in texture, amused as well as irritated by the older poet’s construction of a protagonist meant to draw down sympathy for the oppressed, Māori and Pākehā alike. Except, says the younger poet, they aren’t alike and why should we pretend they are.
Does ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ extinguish ‘The Maori Jesus’? Hardly. Instead, it amplifies the earlier poem, widens its circle of reference and provokes its later audiences with wit and graceful substitutions that link back to Baxter’s poem.
Then there are the first lines of ‘The Maori Jesus’ in stone (actually concrete) set into the pool on the northern side of Te Papa as part of the Wellington Writers’ Walk. On the opening day of the walk in 2002, Baxter’s son John McColl Te Wharematangi Baxter (1952-2026) leapt into the pool and threw arcs of water over his father’s words. His mihi was caught on camera by Evening Post photographer John Nicholson and remains one of the most memorable moments of cultural consonance I can think of.
The two poems, decades apart, are perhaps best understood in their powerful performances by poets who know how to send waves of sound over any audience that wants to listen. Listen to Ben Brown performing ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ for nzepc’s Six-Pack Sound in 2016 (link below). Listen to David Eggleton performing ‘The Maori Jesus’ against an atmospheric soundscape by Wellington composer David Downs for the CD Baxter released in 1999.
What is the time of a poem? Any time a voice carries it into the future.
My thanks to Ben Brown, David Eggleton, Paula Green, Paul Millar, Tim Page and Philippa Werry for their help with piecing together the layers of this appreciation.
Michele Leggott
A timeline for two poems
1966: James K Baxter publishes ‘The Maori Jesus’ in Eikon, issue 2, December 1966, p. 18. Reprinted in Collected Poems, edited by John Weir, Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 348-49. Reissued in 1995 and 2004.
1997: Bruce Morrison and Paul Millar include ‘The Maori Jesus’, recorded by Michael Hurst, in their TV documentary The Road to Jerusalem. Commentary and poem at 58:40:
1999: David Eggleton records ‘The Maori Jesus’ for Baxter CD with a soundscape composed by David Downs:
2002: Wellington Writers’ Walk features the first stanza of ‘The Maori Jesus’ in a pool on the northern side of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, facing the harbour.
2007: Ben Brown (Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāti Mahuta) performs ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ for a Green Party fundraiser at the Lyttelton Coffee Company. The poem is recorded in 2009 for his CD Dogtown (2010).
2010: Ben performs ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ for PHANTOMS AT LOUNGE, 28 April 2010.
2013: ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ appears in Ben’s debut poetry collection Between the Kindling and the Blaze, published by Anahera Press. Review by Paula Green for Poetry Shelf.
2016: Ben records ‘I am the Māori Jesus’ at the University of Auckland for Six-Pack Sound, 30 March 2016.
Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki, Ngāti Paoa) writes children’s books, short stories and poetry for children and adults, general non-fiction, freelance articles and memoir. In 2006 he won Best Picture Book with artist/illustrator Helen Taylor in the NZ Post Children’s Book Awards with their book A Booming in the Night. His poetry has been published in various anthologies here and around the world and Radio NZ and The Radio Network have also recorded him. In 2011 he was the Maori Writer in Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Devonport Auckland. His poetry collection Between the kindling and the blaze was shortlisted in the 2014 Nga Kupu Ora Aotearoa Maori Book Awards. In 2021 he was appointed inaugural Te Awhi Rito New Zealand Children’s Reading Ambassador. He was the Te Kaipukahu University of Waikato Writer in Residence in 2024. He is also a father of two, which he considers his best work to date.
Michele Leggott’s recent publications include Face to the Sky (Auckland University Press, 2023) and Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (Te Papa Press, 2025), co-authored with Catherine Field-Dodgson and long-listed for the 2026 Ockham award for illustrated non-fiction.
It wasn’t for news that we crammed into that room, mouths to the mike like gospel singers at a basement gig. No one listens to school radio stations. Scratch that: no one listens to school radio stations except mothers. Who else would tune in to earnest children sharing their favourite foods? There was no news, but there was Britney’s ‘Toxic’, Jamelia’s ‘Superstar’, Atomic Kitten’s ‘The Tide is High’. Memory shocks with its constancy. On the final night of 2005 I watched the metallic spray of fireworks over my best friend’s roof. She and I were inseparable, as entwined as nesting dolls. We were the reigning stars of each other’s system; everything else was just dust and space junk.
There was no news, except of course there was — Bush back in power, Charles and Camilla hitched, Hurricane Katrina wrecking the Gulf Coast. The Kyoto Protocol committed us to shrinking emissions, and everyone thought: there’s still time left. The first video was uploaded to YouTube, the internet closing over us like an oil spill, and no one thought: some moments aren’t meant to be immortal. Radio became something of our parents’ yesterdays. No waiting and flicking through channels, no wading through what we didn’t want to hear. It was a new age of productivity. Speed was a virtue and we all aimed for sainthood.
We wouldn’t learn about the leap second until later. Rather than less time, the year gifted us more. Which is to say that on New Year’s Eve, the sky crumbling like a mosaic, my friend and I had held each other for one more breath. It didn’t matter if the coming months were unkind. We were queens of the switchboard and its blinking ocean of lights, playing the songs we loved but couldn’t have forever. You’re so desperate to leave your youth that you romanticise the escape. You grow up before you know and you lose more than you can save. The tide is high if you’re not holding on.
Anuja Mitra First published in Turbine | Kapohau (2023)
Anuja Mitra is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Her work has appeared in New Zealand and overseas publications including Landfall, Cordite, takahē, Poetry Aotearoa, Turbine | Kapohau, Sweet Mammalian and Starling, as well as several anthologies. She can be found on Instagram at @anuja_mitra
Lynda sends a photo of lilies she bought for the gravestone our parents share. 61 years, her text says. I haven’t kept tabs on their wedding anniversary. Hadn’t our father stopped counting after our mother was gone? That spot on her lung he couldn’t divorce himself from. It had legs and means to crawl over her. They couldn’t isolate it, like he could: Janice in the doorway, blocking his escape from what she was saying. A hole filled with the length of her confessing what had been happening under her nose. Framed, for not looking.
Brent Kininmont
Brent Kininmont has written two books of poetry: The Companion to Volcanology (2025) and Thuds Underneath (2015), published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. He is based in Tokyo, where he leads seminars in intercultural communication for Japan-based companies and organisations.
You are cordially (and green ginger wine-ly) invited to help me launch my fourth book (second volume of poetry) The Bruise Palette (Firestarter Press).
Come at 6pm, share a glass, there will be (brief) kōrero from me, writing friend Carly Thomas, publisher Anthony Behrens and a special treat from local legend Abi Symes-Button. I’ll read a coupla the poems, too.
I entered this book into the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award (for an unpublished poetry manuscript) last winter and it was longlisted…a boost which gave me the confidence to proceed with publication.
Here’s an excerpt from the blurb:
‘With the grounded lyricism readers loved in The Comforter and A Forager’s Life, Helen Lehndorf captures the beauties and burdens of entanglement with people and with place.
The poems of The Bruise Palette move through the demands of care, complexities of community and raw radiance of deep nature connection.’
Hope to see you there. x
Firestarter Press, Manawatū, Aotearoa. Release date – 29/5/26
Te hari i roto i ngā kupu | Happiness within words
We invite poets with a strong Te Tai Tokerau / Northland connection to submit 3 of your best poems that resonate with this theme. Please include a two-line bio statement.
Each poem should be single spaced and typed in 12 pt. Times New Roman. Poems must be submitted together in a single Word document, with the poet’s name on each page of the document. PDFs and handwritten submissions will not be considered. Please note: no contributor copies provided.
Pot Luck: Poems about Food was published by Landing Press in 2025. Ninety-three food-related poems to get our taste buds salivating. Yes, the poems celebrate the sweet sour savoury delights of food that nourishes and uplifts, food that brings people together at a table for physical and heart nourishment. Food that crosses family trees, cultural choices, vital memories. Inventive, traditional, satisfying. Food as part of mourning or significant occasions. Every day food. Illness food. Composting food. Food chains. Holiday food. Wellness food. Recipes.
Yet importantly the anthology is also mindful of a world awry, of empty bellies, of the starvation and food queues in places such as Gaza, of eating disorders, of toxic food. This book makes me re-feel the world. And that matters.
The seven editors sought a range of voices that showcase the vital range of poets in Aotearoa, from the well known to the emerging, those living here and those overseas. Landing Press also held workshops to extend the range of voices as much as possible.
I am a big fan of food in poetry – I have always, for example, loved how food enhances the collections of Ian Wedde! My links with poetry and food reach right back to my very first collection, Cookhouse (AUP, 1998). I used food as titles for the poems, and food as a metaphor both for the caring experience of mothers (myself), and my concern for language and those who work with words.
And today, in 2026, as much as I love simmering poems and nourishing our poetry communities through the joy and reach and connecting power of words, I love cooking and baking every day, stretching how food nourishes and connects us.
Pot Luck is special! A culinary and poetry delight. A book to get us reading and writing poetry, and to get cooking and sharing food. To celebrate I invited a few of the poets to read their poems. I would have loved to have been at a banquet hearing them all read!
Thank you poets – it is a treat indeed.
Meanwhile submissions are open for the next Landing Press anthology on the theme of water. The submission guidelines are here and if stuck for inspiration, check out these water-related ideas. Note that the email for submissions is landingpresswater@gmail.com. You have until 30 June – lots of time to get thinking and writing.
The readings
Etienne Wain 黃義天
Etienne Wain 黃義天 (he/any) is Peranakan Malaysian-Chinese (客家人Hakka, 海南人 Hainanese, 福建儂 Hokkien) and Pākehā (Scottish, English). He is in his final year of PhD study with Te Kauhanganui Tātai Ture (the Law Faculty) at Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University of Wellington), researching what it means for tauiwi (settler/migrant) communities to understand ourselves as “Tangata Tiriti” (people whose belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand is based on Te Tiriti o Waitangi). Etienne writes poems on being Tangata Tiriti, his experiences as Malaysian-Chinese diaspora, and hope.
Hanadi Hammad Al Bakhas
Hanadi Hammad Al Bakhas is a Syrian-born writer now living in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a deep love for her hometown of Homs. Her poetry draws on memories of home, culture, and tradition, often using food as a way to explore identity, belonging, and connection across generations. Through her writing, she reflects on the stories carried in everyday moments and the ways they travel across borders.
Diane Brown
Diane Brown runs Creative Writing Dunedin and specialises in hybrid forms. Her ninth book, a collection of poems, Growing Up Late, will be published in March 2027 and she is now writing a prose/poetic exploration of female ancestors, Straight as A Pound of Candles.
Githara Gunawardena
Githara Gunawardena is a fourth year English literature student at Victoria University. She moved from Sri Lanka to Wellington in 2020 and has since had her work featured in Starling magazine’s 20th issue, as well as in the 2nd issue of Nine Lives journal.
Helen Lehndorf
Helen Lehndorf is a writer, editor and teacher from Taranaki who lives in the Manawatū. She is the author of The Comforter, Write to the Centre, A Forager’s Life and has a new volume of poetry, The Bruise Palette, coming out in late May 2026. Helen’s website
Tui Bevin
Tui Bevin is a former medical researcher from Ōtepoti Dunedin who was born in Lower Hutt to Danish immigrant parents. She enjoys the freedom and challenge of writing poetry, memoir and essays as a way of processing her understanding of the world and preserving stories for her grandchildren. She has been placed in poetry and writing competitions and published in MINDFOOD, Tui Motu, Flash Frontier, The Otago Daily Times, and Landing Press, NZ Poetry Society and other anthologies.
Janice Marriot
Janice Marriot has written many books, stories, plays and poems for children. She has co-authored four books examining the differences between women’s lives in urban and rural environments. Her preoccupations now are poetry and storytelling, and helping other people to perfect their own writing. She lives in inner Auckland in a small garden and spends a lot of time learning from her grandchild.
Desna Wallace
Desna Wallace is a poet, flash fiction writer and children’s writer. Her work has been published in various anthologies and her micro fiction has been short-listed a few times. Desna enjoys the challenge of word limits and trying to find the best words. She works as a school librarian, teacher aid and tutors creative writing to students at Writeon the School for Young Writers.
The middle section of the book, ‘Cremation sonnets’ resembles a grief casket, where the poems lead in multiple directions, carrying us between presence and absence, letting go, and unable to let go. This lost love. This elegiac memory.
The final sequence of poems, so utterly moving, are written with the ink of love. The poems are addressed to ‘you’, written across a distance between here and there, between hunger and satisfaction, dream and reality, turning away and moving close. This is love. This loved and loving woman. This is ache and this is a yearning to love and be loved. Such gentleness, such a slow perfect unfolding of what is special, with only so much revealed and gently placed in the pockets of the poems. And if this is a love that is over, such deep sadness, it seems to me, that love finds a way to linger in residues, traces, scents.
The word I write in my notebook in my latest reading is bridge, the way poems become a bridge, establish vital bridges. Think sweet and sour crossings, fluid and awkward, here and there, good and not good. Not as a restrictive dichotomy but as a series of movements, like music, like the way personal experience resists pigeon holes. Traversing the myriad bridges in Sophie’s sublime collection makes me both think and feel the world. Yes I am thinking and feeling a version of her world, but also a version of my world. And this moves me.
Rhythm, voice, bridges. I hold this book out to you so you may find your own self-affecting crossings.
A stagger of lemons and a goneness I can’t swallow. Hello the same feeling,
didn’t I wash you off, you get everywhere, sog up my arms
and droop me. It’s something alien in my gut that knows you so well.
I say it again: I am not a creature of sorrow. But I could be proper sad if I put my mind to it,
if someone dropped me from a height.
from ‘The Getting Away’
Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.
Listen to Sophie read two poems on Poetry Shelf: ‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’
NZ Poetry Shelf 