She Dreams

Nearly always she remembers her dreams vividly
At breakfast this morning    she recalled she was flying
through a noiseless storm across the Straits for Ruapuke and her father
who was sitting on his grave   in their whānau urupā
wearing a cloak of raindrops
and she looked down and back at her paddling feet
and saw she wasn’t wearing her favourite red sandals
She stopped in mid-flight   in mid-storm   and called
Alapati   get me my saviours!
Woke and didn’t understand why she’d called them that

It’s been about thirteen years and that makes you the man
I’ve stayed the longest with    she declared unexpectedly
as we cleared the breakfast dishes
To her   such declaration are so obvious and   like raindropsyou can flick easily off a duck’s back
but   for me   it will stay a nit burrowing permanently into my skin
I won’t understand why

If I tell her that   she’ll probably say   You love guilt too much
You read too much into things and need someone to blame
So shall I blame her for staying thirteen years and plus?
For not wearing her saviours and reaching her dead father
who would have taken off his fabulous cloak of rain and draped it around her?
Shall I blame her for not having met me when we were young
and we could have been together much longer?

Or shall I   as usual   let it pass
content that I am blessed to be with her
and   in her dreams  one day she and I will fly togther
through the voiceless storm to Ruapuke and her waiting father?
She will be wearing her saviours
and we will arrive safely

September-October 2005

Albert Wendt
from Mānoa to a Ponsonby Garden, AUP, 2012

   I chose to respond to this poem because I often sat at the breakfast table with my motherand grandmother, recounting and interpreting dreams. My grandmother said that Sāmoan dreams are conversations with ancestors and atua.  I kept a dream journal for years. Dreams connect me to ancestors and ancestral knowledge. Provide glimpses of past and future events. Enable me to guide and help people.

   Then I became ill. Was prescribed endocrine therapy, a treatment for hormone-positive breast cancer. Aromatase inhibitors and targeted therapy medications affected my mind. I slept a lot. Experienced brain fog. Couldn’t dream. Felt incredibly vulnerable, abandoned, frightened. Oncologists proffered antidepressants, controlled drug ‘holidays’, and counselling. This side effect of my treatment wasn’t, and still isn’t, relevant to them. They say, “It hasn’t been reported in any clinical trials or studies.”

     She dreams comforted me when drugs stole my visions. The poem opens with the adverbial phrase, “Nearly always”, priming the audience to expect the reocurrance of a high-probability process, event, or condition. We encounter Reina, who refers to her partner, the narrator, as Alapati – the Sāmoan version of Albert. She vividly recalls dreams, and in a recent moemoeā had flown through a storm toward her dead father, who was sitting upon his grave, on an island called Ruapuke. She was propelled through ātea by paddling feet, but unaccountably desired to wear her favourite red sandals – her ‘saviours’.  The dreamer has agency within her moemoeā. She stops flying and issues an imperative, Alapati   get me my saviours!

   I’m reminded of another pair of red shoes, the magical ruby slippers given to Dorothy after she’s swept away by a tornado from Kansas to the land of Oz. What is it about red shoes and flying  through tempests?  That’s another story. Perhaps a poem.  I also note that Reina, though ancestrally linked to the Atua of thunder, flies through a noisless storm toward her waiting father, who wears a cloak of raindrops. She flys through her bloodline. Embodies the magic and mystery of sound. 

    I enjoy the interchanges between Albert and Reina. The in-ya-face declarations and imagined banter that demonstrate intimacy, angst, self-awareness, and most of all – the enduring substance of a treasured relationship. I’m delighted that after their sojourn in Mānoa there’s life in Ponsonby. Aroha. Alofa. And I imagine that one day, when all is as it should be, this couple will fly to Ruapuke, and the two hills will watch them arrive safely. And Reina will be wearing her saviours.

Serie Barford

* moemoeā      (Māori) noun, dream

* atua               (Sāmoan) “God” or a deity/supernatural spirit. Across Polynesian cultures, it refers to                         powerful spiritual entities or ancestral gods.

*ātea                (Māori)  a wide expanse, outer space, or a physical gap.

*aroha             (Māori) love

*alofa               (Sāmoan) love

Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother (Lotofaga) and a Pālagi father. She held a 2018 Pasifika Writer’s residency at the Michael King Centre, performed at the 2019 International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv, and collaborated with filmmaker Anna Marbrook for the 2021 Going West Different Out Loud poetry series. Her poetry collection (2021), Sleeping with Stones, was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Standing on My Shadow (Anahera, 2025) was longlisted for the 2026 Ockham Book Awards.

Maualaivao Albert Wendt CNZM is of the āiga Sa-Maualaivao of Malie, āiga Sa-Su‘a of Lefaga, āiga Sa-Patu of Vaiala and āiga Sa-Asi of Moata‘a, Sāmoa. An esteemed poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright and painter, he is also Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, specialising in New Zealand and Pacific literatures and creative writing. Wendt has been an influential figure in the developments that have shaped New Zealand and Pacific literature since the 1970s and was made Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2001 for his services to literature. His Adventures of Vela, a novel in verse, was published in 2008; and his co-edited collection Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English was shortlisted for the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards. 

Todd Barrowclough’s interview with Albert at ANZL Academy of NZ Literature