Te Tiriti Meditates
Haakina…
Remember the cicadas filling the air
Haaputa…
Feel the land beneath your toes slipping
with your jandals
Haakina…
Lift your eyes to the beach at Paihia
Haaputa…
And that sparkling wave, those oars dipping
rising at the side of the cutter
Haakina…
Hobson pulling on his hat and jacket
Haaputa…
We are one, be at one with him, be at one with them
Haakina…
Listen to the salute, boom.
Will that be American Express or Diners Club? asks Billy T. James.
Ka kimi patero ia. How embarrassing.
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 17th, which is the day his Ngāti Manu tūpuna signed Te Tiriti.
NZ Poetry Shelf 