When I was an awkward misfit teenager, I discovered Hone Tuwhare in our secondary-school library and his words spun gold and silver and sweet rivers inside me. This is what words can do. How I loved ‘Rain’ and ‘No ordinary sun’. Words have continued to ignite my heart, my senses, the possibilities of the world, transforming pathways to past present future.

Early one morning we were driving to the blood lab, listening to Kamala Harris on the radio, talking to a gathering of people and it it filled me with both joy and hope. The almost-full moon hung in the sky, a bright beauty patch in a sky of pink grey blue, with a collage of clouds, cut-out shapes like a child’s painting. But my eyes kept returning to the moon, musing on the moon, on its enduring magnificence.

When I read a poem and the moon makes an appearance, it’s like a little patch of shine, a beauty prompt, a reading pause of wonder. When I decided to assemble clusters of poems around themes and motifs, especially themes and motifs that have been used for centuries, my first thought was to start with the moon. No matter how many moon poems have been written, whether the moon is the main focus or a sideline glint, it’s appearance can still enhance the reading experience.

So I begin my theme clusters with the moon, and over the coming months will assemble others such as sun, stars, harbour, rain, fancy dress.

The poems

See What a Little Moonlight Can Do to You?

The moon is a gondola.
It has stopped rocking.
Yes. It’s stopped now.

And to this high plateau
its stunning influence
on surge and loll of tides
within us should

somehow not go
unremarked
for want of breath
or oxygen.

And if I
to that magic micro-second
instant
involuntary arms reach out
to touch detain

then surely
it is because you
are so good:
so very good to me.

Hone Tuwhare
from Mihi: Collected Poems, Penguin Books, 1987

VII.

The moon is sometimes just the moon
no one cares about shimmering
no one asked it to glow
did we request this luminosity?

There it is! Just there
still bleached and airborne even
in the cold tick of morning
on my way to teach the poets.

Rose Collins
from ‘Teaching the Poets’, in My Thoughts Are All of Swimming, Sudden Valley Press, 2024

Song with a Chorus

The child stands
in the moonlight on the moon
and bounces slowly.
His mother tucks him in.
The light tickles his chin a little.
Dear one, dear one.

Illness is here with its puzzling song.
It muddles your mind
yet tells the truth. For a while
the doctor remembers his own youth
when he, too, was cute.
My lovely one.

The moon lists to port
then to starboard. It is
somehow charming, the way
a mother weeps.
The tears repeat slowly.
My dear, my sweet.

A tear hits the forehead:
a piece of that great sea
we witness and respect.
A doctor would once have said hectic
but what now to say?
Dear one, my dear.

Meantime the moon is always travelling.
Stones live on its surface.
You throw them and they take an hour to land.
Give me your hand. Hold me.
It goes around the planet.
Oh my dear one.

Bill Manhire
from Victims of Lightning, Te Herenga Waka University Prtess (VUP),

The dark side of the moon

grief is a fist of whirling mussel shells
slicing
scraping
shredding what remains

a white pigeon heard you’d flown the coop
took me gently under his wing

Filemu Filemu Filemu I crooned
offered water
seeds
leftovers

he ate everything except cooked carrots

was a peaceful presence in my dismantled world

one morning Filemu was gone
waning Masina rested instead
on the guano-splattered roof

I ached to patch her incomplete beauty

I am fully present Masina chided. Heal yourself
instead of tinkering with my perfection.

I closed my eyes

saw the dark side of the moon

white feathers falling in the rain

Serie Barford
from Sleeping with Stones, Anahera Press, 2021

Ulysses

-and O yes that night the
moon was like a wet jockstrap
and the poets were all right
after all. He — our hero —

waded into the winedark water
down from the rusty ladder
where orange bloomed on his
palms and — O — he said, like

a man in a newspaper clipping,
mouth like the wide wet clink of
a stray fin — O how heroically
he shivered. No passerbys no nothing,

white endless streams of light on
his fingers turning white with wind.
Endless reams of stars. Sewn brocade.
Everything like everything else except

the crumbling of towers in his brasscoin
face. History involved itself upon him.
He found himself compelled, com-
pelled and con-vinced to stop struggling

against what was always surely coming,
what had slated against his better
judgement, like a shield. And all of Rome
fell in his sandy shoes.

Cadence Chung

How it all began

Such pitiful pleas — her thirsty brats.

Husbandless, she bends her will, grabs
a calabash, heads off through the ngaio trees and mamaku ferns.

Such pitiful pleas — her thirsty brats.

She stumbles. Her curses echo through forest and starlight.

Stuff you, moon,
boil your pea brain with pūhā.
Put your flat head into the cooking pot.

The one time I need you, you hide.
Coward, cheat.

I am the sleeping moon.
An ashen cloud conceals my beams.

I am aroused, enchanted. This is the wife I dream of.

Don’t you know I am no ordinary moon? Did I set the clouds to stall?
There’s no light for Rona.

I slither around her, buffed and highly sexed. She succumbs.

Wrapped in my sensations, my reflected-light limbs — we become lovers.

The story is that she pines for her lost infants. That’s a lie.

We fuse all night long when you are staring up at us. But you can’t see that far.
Just ask her —

Rona, are you happy?

Oh yes, my love
Oh yes
Come lie with me Take off your slippers.

Her brats grow, invent haka.
You know where that got them —

no land, no language.
Free entertainment every rugby match.

Reihana Robinson
from Auē Rona, Steele Roberts, 2012

Moon

Soft. Softer.

I walk across a small carless island when the moon is
at its widest, and once, on a country road, I turn off the
headlights to know the amount of light.

I have also loved the foghorn.

Madeleine Slavick
from Town, The Cuba Press, 2024

The poets

Bill Manhire’s most recent books, all published by Te Herenga Waka University Press / Victoria Press, include Wow (2020), Some Things to Place in a Coffin (2017), Tell Me My Name (with Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, 2017) and The Stories of Bill Manhire (2015). He was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate, and founded and until recently directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. He has edited major anthologies, including, with Marion McLeod, the now classic Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories (1984).

Cadence Chung is a poet, mezzo-soprano, and composer, currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her nationally-bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in April 2022 with Tender Press. She also performs as a classical soloist, presents on RNZ Concert, and co-edits Symposia Magazine, a literary journal for emerging New Zealand writers. In 2023, she was named an Emerging Practioner by the Fund for Acting and Musical Endeavours. She likes to sing Strauss, write art songs, and buy overpriced perfume.

Hone Tuwhare(1922 — 2008) was of Ngāpuhi descent, with connections to Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Uri-o-Hau, Te Popoto, Ngāti Hine and Ngāti Kurī hapū. He was born in Kaikohe and grew up near Auckland. He was the author of No Ordinary Sun (1964), Come Rain Hail (1970), Sap-wood & Milk (1970), Shape-Shifter (1997), and Piggy-Back Moon (2001), among other books. Hone organized the first Māori Writers and Artists Conference in 1973. He received multiple awards and honours including a Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, a Montana New Zealand Book Award, was our second Poet Laureate of New Zealand from 1999 to 2001 and received the inaugural Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2003. That year, The Arts Foundation named him one of 10 living icons of the New Zealand arts.

Madeleine Slavick writes and photographs. Her books of photography, poetry, and non-fictioninclude Town, My Body My Business – New Zealand sex workers in an era of change (as photographer), Fifty Stories Fifty Images, Something Beautiful Might Happen, My Favourite Thing, delicate access, and Round – Poems and Photographs of Asia. Awards include the RAK Mason Fellowship. Madeleine has initiated and coordinated many community arts programmes – in Hong Kong and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Reihana Robinson (he tamaiti whāngai) is a writer, artist, and environmental activist. Her first poetry collection is part of AUP New Poets 3.  Auē Rona (Steele Roberts) and Her Limitless Her (Makāro Press) are her first two poetry collections. She received the inaugural Te Atairangikaahu Poetry Award. She lives some of the year in Montague MA and the rest, near Moehau in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Currently working on two collections of poetry and one novel.

Rose Collins (1977 -2023), born in New Zealand and of Irish descent, was a poet and short fiction writer. She worked as a human rights lawyer before completing the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2010. She won the 2022 John O’Connor Award and the 2020 Micro Madness Competition, and has been shortlisted for the UK Bare Fiction Prize (2016), the Bridport Prize (2020) and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize (2020). Rose was the 2018 Writer in Residence at Hagley College. She was a some-time litigation lawyer, a beekeeper and a mother of two. She lived in Te Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour with her family.

Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother (Lotofaga) and a Pālagi father. She was the recipient of a 2018 Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie performed from her collections at the 2019 Arsenal Book Festival in Kyiv, where the Ukrainian translation of Tapa Talk was launched.  In 2021 Serie collaborated with film-maker Anna Marbrook for the ‘Different Out Loud Poetry Project. Her most recent collection, Sleeping With Stones, was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards. In 2022 she collaborated with Dutch artist Dorine Van Meel, whose video and performance piece, ‘Silent Echoes’, was exhibited in various European cities to address colonial practices and climate crisis through poetic contributions.