Te Tiriti Says Mōrena
I felt cheesed off by the oral hearings
about me. I felt a little deracinated
to borrow a French word from Rimbaud
who wrote Un saison en enfer—deracinated
to see my innards unravelled, to stamp
on my first second and third clauses
and even the spoken spiritual one.
So I bought myself the lovely drip coffee maker
with the timer in the Briscoes sale
to wake with a cuppa in the morning.
Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan is Aotearoa New Zealand’s 14th Poet Laureate. He belongs to Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki) iwi and is also of Irish descent. He has won many literary awards. His most recent books are Hopurangi / Songcatcher (AUP) which was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards, Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology coedited with Janet Newman (Otago University Press 2024) and a collection of essays coedited with Anna Jackson and Dougal McNeill, Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa (AUP 2025). Robert is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. He lives in Ōamaru.
To launch Poetry Shelf 2026, our current Poet Laureate Robert Sullivan has written a sequence called “Tidbits of Te Tiriti”. He wrote these Te Tiriti Tidbits in the voice of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. There will be one published each day for this Waitangi Day weekend, and then a fifth one on Feb 13th, which is the day his Ngāti Manu tūpuna signed Te Tiriti.
NZ Poetry Shelf 