In the Hollow of the Wave, Nina Mingya Powles Auckland University Press, 2025 first published, Nine Arches Press, UK, 2025
handiwork
People asked me where I learned and I said I taught myself the slow work of making.
But memory is a house with scraped white walls. I step inside and choose what to take, what to leave behind.
My hands feel their way through the gathering, the careful pulling apart.
The work of particular poets can strike you so deeply, so resonantly. Poets who produce collections that satisfy your hunger to read so keenly, with books that take up residency in both your mental and physical poetry rooms. Nina Mingya Powles has been that kind of poet for me, from her terrific debut collection Magnolia 木蘭, through her various other published offerings. Her new collection, In the Hollow of the Wave, is one of the most gorgeous poetry books I have held this year – a sweet combination of heavenly paper stock, generous size, lovingly-tended internal design and vital breathing room. Nina has also created textile works that add to the visual beauty and allure of the book.
Textile is a key word. I experience the book as multiple loomwork: a weaving of memory, experience, language, cottons and fabric. Weaving as a way of observing the world, feeling the world, observing the object, feeling the object, observing the past, feeling the past. It might be the sewing machine upon which her grandfather stitched quilts from garments belonging to her siblings, mother and grandmother. It might be a gown, a pleat, or a sheet of white paper or fabric.
And now, with In the Hollow of the Wave, the granddaughter is herself stitching quilts; inside the stitched poem the stitched cloth, and inside the stitched cloth the stitched poem. I experience contemplation pockets tucked with memory pleats, and inside memory pleats, I threads of slow contemplation: andante, largo, adagio.
The book title is borrowed from a line in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It gains its own life as Nina ponders Virginia’s use of orientalism and Kitsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’. The poem haunts, the hollow in the wave haunts, the recurrent pulse of existence and non-existence haunt. The poem is skin-prickling reading:
beyond the frame I saw a distant city / a place I used to know / where rain falls in the foreground / all day and all night / I took out my sketchbook / sharpened my pencil / drew a line across the sea / asked the mountain / what does it mean to see and be unseen / it did not answer
So many echoes across the collection. So many threads to follow and pause on(slip stitch, ladder stitch, cross stitch). There is the scent of plants and plantings, herbal remedies, the reminder of the women in poverty who stitched the garments we wear, the reflection of self in a stirred pan on the stove, the way dreaming seeps into making, the way the language, chores, hopes and the lives of women still matter. The way poetry can be a way of asking questions.
Inside the hollow of a wave is a poem. And inside that poem is a book. A book such as this one. Stitched with aroha and luminous threads. I want you to read it for yourself and get absorbed in its beauty and craft. It has already found spots in my poetry rooms.
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently based in London. Her debut poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭, was published in New Zealand, the UK and the US, and was a finalist in the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Powles won the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for under-represented nature writers in 2019. Her resulting book of essays Small Bodies of Water was published in 2021 by Canongate. She has also published a short food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020).]
The verb to be is not, in Māori. How, then, would we translate that soliloquy?
We had the choice. We said not. Is this why they (me) tried so hard to
kill us (we)? We need be not. We live, which is a dark disguise
a river which itself swims. Beauty which flies into nets and tropes.
This is a warning and we all hear it: our wheels rumble and hum high strung
before we veer (volcanic) left or right towards the grimacing witness.
*
Look at me posing like this! Like that! A mother in a tizz with salt sea hair struggles not to stray.
Later a bodied wine will warm her glass and mine, the chamber of my voice, my rising
chest. Like mine her verbs and nouns resist. Her troubles, like the unforgiving
childgod, sometimes break the plates. Volcano in a fortification. Mirror in a mirror.
At any time at least one of us is looking straight ahead, no fraying, no strays. Look at me kneeling like this!
Look at me holding all fine things towards you! The deep blood beat of my music. Be, it sings. Be. Be.
Hinemoana Baker
Takatāpui poet and performer Hinemoana Baker traces her ancestry from Ngāti Raukawa-ki-te-Tonga, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa and Kāi Tahu, and from England and Germany. Her four poetry collections, several original music albums and other sonic and written work have seen her on stages and pages nationally and in many other countries around world in the last 25 years. Her most recent poetry collection, ‘Funkhaus’ (THWUP 2021) was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and has been translated into German and Polish. Having lived in Berlin for 9 years, Hinemoana has now returned home, and recently finished a term as Randell Cottage Trust’s 2024 writer in residence, living and writing at the historic homestead at the base of Te Ahumairangi (Thorndon) in Te-Whanga-nui-a-Tara.
Currently Hinemoana is working towards a Creative Writing doctorate at IIML (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University), for which she is writing a new collection called ‘Exhaust World’. As a long-time teacher and mentor for other writers, Hinemoana is also involved in facilitating poetry sessions for takatāpui and LGBTQI+ Māori writers, through Mana Tipua Trust in Ōtautahi. These sessions, called ‘Ruri Rongoā’, are also part of Hinemoana’s doctoral research, facilitating poetry wānanga as a form of rongoā, repair, solidarity and community. In this work she draws on the model of Te Whare Takatāpui, a framework created by Dr. Elizabeth Kerekere.
Welcome to the new Cafe Reading series on Poetry Shelf. Listening to poets read and talk poetry in cafe settings is a joy. To share a taste of this, I have invited some poets to read and talk poetry over the coming months. Enjoy!
Richard von Sturmer reads two tankas
Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer. He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1957. His recent works are the acclaimed memoir, This Explains Everything (Atuanui Press, 2016), Postcard Stories (Titus Books, 2019), and Resonating Distances (Titus Books, 2022).
In 2020 he was the University of Waikato’s writer-in-residence. His book Walking with Rocks, Dreaming with Rivers: My Year in the Waikato (Titus Books, 2023) was written during his residency.
In 2025 his new collection of poetry, Slender Volumes (Spoor Books, 2024), was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards.
Given Words, established and curated by poet Charles Olsen for ten years, has been a regular feature of Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day. After deliberating alongside Pat White and Sophia Wilson, Charles recently published the winning poems and a selection of special mentions in both the adults’ and under-16s’ categories. Over 160 poems were received this year, and the judges have chosen 64 to publish here on Given Words.
This year the ‘given words’ were supplied by five filmmakers: Ebba Jahn, Tom Konyves, Cindy Stockton Moore, Ian Gibbins and Colm Scully. Here are the five words: justice, endure, pair, lightfast, hold.
The winner of Best Poem is Sadie Yetton for her poem ‘Venus, Don’t You Laugh At Me ‘and the winner of Best Poem by Under-16s, for the second year running, is Miranda Yuan for her poem ‘The Menu’.
For this 10th edition, and because there were so many wonderful poems, the judges awarded Special Mentions in the adults category to Gail Zing for her poem ‘Lightfast’, Cindy Kurukaanga for her poem ‘Nō Te Paruparu, Nō Te Purapura | Of the Mud, Of the Seed’, and to Renee Liang for her poem ‘Pinhole’. In the under-16s category, Special Mentions go to Sabrina Li for her poem ‘Photos taken the day they said it was over’, Gia Beckett for her poem ‘My Purple Life!’, and Lily Richards for her poem ‘Thread of Reality’.
Congratulations to all on behalf of Given Words, The Cuba Press and Massey University Press. You can read the judges comments and all the winning poems on the Given Words website, but here are the two winning poems.
Venus, Don’t You Laugh At Me
Venus, don’t you laugh at me I’m your daughter, it appears you made a crooked one Stilted in manner, steadfast in mania Unjust in justice, your infinite amusement Venus, you birthed a brute You spat out a savage You knew I’d fall on the way of love Just as wolves fall on rabbits Making a mess of how I eat it; blood, bones, brain Clueless how to clean up after myself What have I ever been if not your doing? I was a child, then a child with a woman’s voice I was lightning, lightfast, then lightless I was a person, then somehow only parts of one But I’ve always been of your blood And you can’t bleed it out of me A creature is still a child if it claims to be A freak is due her worth if she endures Venus, I know why you laugh at me Because not feigning hilarity At your own incompetence is worse than being so Even with your back to me, we’re a pair of siamese souls Because this rabid thing resembles its mother And she wants you to hold her like you mean it Look at who you made Love it
Sadie Yetton Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
The Menu
Tonight’s Special: The Final Feast
Appetizer Bread And circuses to entertain the masses. Elevated rations of what the poor had to endure. Olive A single fruit offered from the branch. Starvation is minimalism, and minimalism is art.
Main Lamb From the slaughter with flesh that tastes like still-warm blood. Pair it with red wine lightfast on the lips. Whose feet had juiced the grapes? Let’s raise a glass to justice.
Dessert Pomegranate Six seeds to hold you– sweet as the promise of love. Brûlée The world burns with a hint of orange.
Image: Poet Selina Tusitala Marsh. Photo by Mark Beatty, 2021.
Event by National Library of New Zealand Corner Molesworth and Aitken Streets, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand 6011 Duration: 2 hr
Eleven New Zealand Poets Laureate line up for poetry, with Fergus Barrowman as MC, in a key event for the National Library’s 60th birthday celebration.
A rare gathering of our most celebrated poet. Come along to a poetry reading featuring nearly all living New Zealand Poets Laureate.
It’s been almost 30 years since John Buck created the Te Mata Estate Winery Laureate Award and Bill Manhire became our first Laureate. Both will be there to support an outstanding line-up of poets: Elizabeth Smither, Jenny Bornholdt, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Ian Wedde, Karl Stead, Selina Tusitala Marsh, David Eggleton, Chris Tse, and Robert Sullivan.
Fergus Barrowman, publisher at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University Press, will MC the event. There will also be special readings to honour the late Vincent O’Sullivan and Brian Turner, shared by Vincent’s son Dominic and Brian’s partner, writer Jillian Sullivan.
This free, public event promises to be a highlight of Wellington’s poetry scene in 2025.
The winners of the 2025 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize have been announced. The competition is now in its fifteenth year, and this year attracted 150 poems from New Zealand, the USA and Germany. This year’s competition was judged by poet Robert Sullivan.
This year’s winner is Helen Williford-Lower from Te Matau-a-Māui (Hawkes Bay) for her poem “Tōku Kōhine o Waikouaiti”. Runner up is Ura TeĀta (Kuki Airani Māori, Mitiaro, Penhryn, Manihiki, Rakahanga, e Atiu, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Waikato Tainui, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāpuhi hoki, Tahiti, Ra ‘iātea, Samoa, Malie) from Waitangirua, Porirua for her poem “Grammar is Right?”.
The winner receives $600 and a week’s stay at the Caselberg House. The runner up poet receives $300. The winning poem and Robert’s judge’s report will be published in October in Landfall 250 – Spring 2025, and subsequently on our Caselberg Trust website along with the runner up and Highly Commended poems.
The judge also recognised two poems with Highly Commended awards – ”The strength of water” by Gail Zing (Ōtautahi Christchurch), and ‘How to pop a bottle with another bottle’ by Jordan Hamel (e Tihi o Maru, Timaru).
In his judge’s report Mr Sullivan noted that “I’m delighted to report that “Tōku Kōhine o Waikouaiti” has won this year’s Caselberg Poetry prize. For those who do not read te reo Māori, this poem in six stanzas is a praise poem celebrating the speaker’s relationship with a young woman from Waikouaiti and her southern ancestry and the continuum of the indigenous frame of reference there.”
He went on further to say that Ms Williford-Lower’s poem “makes many allusions to the local knowledges of the land and its people including spiritual creatures associated with the whenua, its flora and coastline, and its pastoral landscape. It is both a love poem for an unnamed woman, and for that woman’s homeland. This love, the speaker seems to be saying, grows for the land through the young woman’s freely given unconditional love for both the speaker and the land.”
The Caselberg Trust would like to thank the University Bookshop (UBS) for its continued sponsorship of the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize, and for supporting poetry in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I can see it all already: sitting up long after the kiwi and cat have gone to bed to do whatever it is they do when the screen scrambles to noisy snow.
I’ll hear you shut the front door with a soft click that makes me jump – just time to fix a welcoming smile before you bound into the kitchen (perhaps for a drink) blooming with your secret life.
What shall we say? Will I blurt out, “Do you know what time it is!”, angry with relief that you’re home at last and apparently unharmed from that film, that party, that lover?
Would that be better or more likely than a ‘Had a nice time, sweetheart?’, poured out with an oh-so-casual cup of tea? ‘Sorry, Dad.’ ‘Yes, Dad.’ Not now, not soon, but sometime it will happen.
Harry Ricketts First published in Coming Here (Nagare Press, 1989)
I wrote ‘Your Secret Life’ one Sunday afternoon in late 1986. I was sitting at my desk, on one side a line of roll-up cigarettes, on the other a half-drunk cup of coffee. I was making notes for a first-year poetry lecture which would include two of my favourite Fleur Adcock’s poems, ‘For Andrew’ and ‘For a Five-Year-Old’. I could vaguely hear my six-year-old daughter Jessie and four-year-old son Jamie outside on the trampoline. They sounded happy.
Above the first Adcock poem, I scribbled ‘self-deflating’ and alongside the second ‘rhyme’, ‘shape’, ‘tone’: hooks that might help with the lecture. I started thinking about the effect of the delayed rhyme in ‘For a Five-Year-Old’, the quiet pulse of the iambic pentameters before the shortened eighth line, the apparently easy conversational tone, the admission of past acts, unkindnesses, betrayals, the raised eyebrow (amused? wry? rueful?) at the conclusion: ‘But that is how things are: I am your mother, / and we are kind to snails.’
I thought about the son reflecting back to the mother a trusting version of herself, which gives her pause. This pause, I saw, was the poem. My mind bumped to an early scene in Edge of Darkness, an apocalyptic TV series I’d been avidly watching. The camera pans slowly round a student bedroom as a policeman goes through his dead daughter’s possessions, pauses as he looks numbly at her things. These two pauses fused in my mind. I thought of Jessie outside on the trampoline. I imagined her as a teenager. I’d be in the kitchen, waiting up for her. It would be late. She would be late. I’d hear the front door click. She would come in; the phrase ‘blooming with your secret life’ jumped into my head. I jotted down phrases, bits of imagined dialogue, a possible ending: ‘Not now, not soon, / but sometime it will happen.’ The poem seemed, half-involuntarily, to write itself, and I felt (really for the first time) that it sounded like me.
Soon afterwards at a reading, I’d usually open with ‘Your Secret Life’. It seemed to strike a chord. I still often begin with it. But, for me, the poem has long taken on quite a different meaning. Within five years, my marriage had broken up, and Jessie and I lived in different hemispheres. That imagined late-night encounter happened only in the poem, never in real life. Instead, I’d receive bulletins on the phone (the previous night for her, the following morning for me). Sometimes the line wobbled with echoes; sometimes it was clear as a bell, and I wrote poems about those heart-turning calls.
Harry Ricketts lives in Wellington. He is a poet, biographer, essayist, editor, anthologist and literary scholar and has published 34 books, most recently First Things: A Memoir (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024). His thirteenth collection of poems, Bonfires on the Ice (Te Herenga Waka University Press), will appear in November.
It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and your face is red as sunset. You are eager like a young dog, chasing words for salivating feelings
and day by day building a rockpool full of creatures and colours, and rushes of tunneling sand. I want to ask why you loved me so.
Nothing I did, even in fantasy, was ever deserving of it. You tell me that in your sky the crescent cycles back and forth, threading the waist
of the moon, never quite full or empty. I didn’t understand it. Is it possible to be wrong about a world you don’t believe in? What is that shape in your eye,
or is it a smile, opening you? And what is that, moving, underneath the sand? This place you have made, I cannot begin to understand it.
When you dream, you dream of me.
Maia Armistead
Maia Armistead is a poet and student originally from Hamilton. She has been published in such places as Starling, Mayhem, Sweet Mammalian and The Spinoff, and is one of the editors of Symposia Magazine.
Pro-Palestine supporters gathered in Aotea Square (Source: Te Ahipourewa Forbes)
I am dedicating my first Protest post to Gaza. I’ve already posted Gaza poems on the blog, but I’m bringing them together here, along with others; poets and poems standing together, heart alongside heart, voice alongside voice. Some poets were unsure their poems were protest poems, but I think of the Poetry Shelf Protest series as a way of shining light, a way of showing support, a way of saying no to inhumanity, injustice, cruelty, and all manner of -isms.
Unlike so many other countries, Winston Peters recently refused to acknowledge the Palestinian State and, for many of us, this was a shameful move. Every morning we wake to the news of more unforgivable slaughter, greater starvation, lack of medical care.
In Aotearoa, we have been protesting on the streets, signing petitions, funding raising, organising readings, writing and sharing news articles and analysis, and we have been writing poetry.
In August, Airini Beautrais helped to organise a reading for Palestine in Whanganui. She said: “The event was very moving, and a lot of people were in tears, but went away feeling hopeful. Reading poetry felt like an affirmative and spirited response to an awful situation. We collected koha for grassroots organizations in Palestine.”
We’ve got to speak shout sing and whisper, hold a vital light, hold our loved ones close, hold each precious day and take the next compassionate step whether fierce or gentle.
With grateful thanks to all the poets who contributed to this collective protest.
Let’s keep writing and sharing poetry. Let’s keep protesting.
Some GAZA poems
Prayer
Beads of war a rosary turning round and round between his finger and thumb touching each one as it circulates like oxygen in blood evidence of atrocity lay on the floor on the whenua in the red red rock at Ōnawe like stains on the body bags in Gaza gagging my throat as they carry her away without ceremony I see the dead in the eyes of the bereft: “ka mate au i taku tangata”
the rosary continues on its relentless spin like the earth on its axis where nobody pays for their sin though the utu unparallels the hara, changing the angle of the earth now unbalanced towards hurt, towards shame towards a hopeless game where the unholy become righteous, the evildoer the hero, the arms dealer the winner the liar the truth-teller
kai hea te karakia kia tau ai i te rakimarie?
Ariana Tikao Catalyst 22, 2025
Standing at the roundabout on Highway 10 on a Saturday morning, waving our Free Palestine flags and our Stop the Genocide signs, the twenty-five of us are a bit of a spectacle. Old people, young people, dogs, and children stare at us from inside new cars and little old cars, Utes with huge exhaust pipes, dirty farm trucks, ambulances, and police cars. Nearly half of the drivers toot their horn and wave; the occasional person gives us the fingers, the thumbs down, or a gesture that says we are crazy, but lots of the drivers and passengers and all the dogs just look. They open their eyes wide and stare at us for the whole time it takes to go around the roundabout and pass by; then they are gone and who knows what they will think about for the rest of this day. We are the human animals who live here, all of us parts of the sometimes kind and sometimes frightening whole.
Lynn Jenner from her unpublished collection The Gum Trees of Kerikeri
Gaza
The dead boy tries to open his eyes. He wants to see the world he is leaving. But there is nothing to see here, nothing and nothing, and anyway he is gone. His parents held him while he died but they are both dead, too. Or he held them, no one remembers.
Bill Manhire
Book of Yahoo
The Yahoo wages war to excoriate the poor, and beat Gaza to the floor. The Yahoo taps on his media feed, just to watch Gaza bleed. Gaza bleeds and the Yahoo leads with a look-what-you-made-me-do dance video.
The Yahoo brings selfies to the slaughter. The Yahoo declares open season for murder of professors of literature, professors of medicine, professors of ethics, professors of peace studies.
When the day’s food ration for Gaza might fill an abandoned suitcase, the Yahoo decrees the suit-case is booby-trapped and orders it blown-up with a missile.
The Yahoo decrees that, by whatever means at hand, those left behind must draw a line in quicksand, and prepare for their last stand in what was once homeland.
The Yahoo decrees that a zone of interest is defined by the cries coming from Gaza, as eyes seek eyes to confirm that what ears hear is refugees on fire ignited with napalm.
The Yahoo decrees your daily life is rubbish, left behind a wall taken for landfill, and that your song will be followed by a bomb blast, and your protest poem will be followed by a massacre, and your people will be driven out, driven back, driven over.
The Yahoo decrees no mercy, flatten Gaza, wipe them off the face of the earth, and if the earth itself is grieving, then scorch it into silence.
All is written in indelible red, but the Yahoo declares, he will not be satisfied until the Dead Sea itself is a sea of the dead.
The Yahoo blabs secrets to ears of corn. The hand of God scribbles red on the sky, as puddles of blood form where bodies lie, but what happens to stars when they die?
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. A numbskull is a numbskull is a numbskull. A tooth is a tooth and an eye is an eye.
David Eggleton
But Not Beautiful
At ecstatic dance I am acutely aware for the first ten minutes or so of wanting to appear graceful beautiful which is the exact opposite of the point of ecstatic dance and besides everyone’s eyes are closed anyway No one is looking at me and I can’t see myself Finally I’m in a groove letting myself dance all feral and shit this voice comes over the speakers just beneath the drum and bass and I don’t know why I think she sounds mournful and then I am inside of one of the reels that keeps playing on my phone again and again Palestinian mother grieving her children again the Palestinian girl with blood spreading across her chest like crushed fruit eyes wild with fear I am crying and swivelling my hips to a dance beat shoving my ass cheeks from one diagonal to the other and back letting my face crumple into its own kind of flower but not beautiful not graceful and my own grief rises in my throat like the same red paint spreading across the girl’s chest ribs buds of breasts My grief is not about my life it reaches back through my entire lineage It’s why I was so scared in the pandemic why I bellied up to a vaccine I knew nothing about So easy to succumb to terror and the wish to make it go away with a single jab Or three It’s completely mixed up with the history unfolding now Boys shot in line for flour And now Premies in incubators gone cold Mothers whose breasts have run dry And Now
Kim Cope Tait
and I want to say
under the helmet, the American soldier pumps drum, excess bass, extra electric motherfucker guitar, until the music enters, urges, burns, and he says now me and my gun can release into The Zone
o my young one, my brother, this recruited Alabama teen, that hired boy from Flint, from inner city, inner poverty, please don’t sing as you kill, don’t tap to red, hum to murder
o mother and father of a coffin, a sad risk, the beginning of a long missing, a slow losing, I want to say you will find your child of flesh, of wish
and Mr. Bush, son of oil and gun, break your mirror of fear, of terror, you make families wail that Allah has failed, and the world needs to breathe again.
Madeleine Slavick I wrote this poem after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, but it also speaks to the horrors of the genocide in Gaza.
THE RESTAURANT OF MY DREAMS
It’s 2024, October 16. The Guardian says a state-of-the-art fire station in western Germany that was completed last year at a cost of tens of millions of euros has burned to the ground because it had not been equipped with a fire alarm.
In recent dreams I’m holding a koala. I’m holding or hunting for a koala or my father. Reversing a huge car into a tiny park or my ex. By the time we arrive the kitchen is closed but we eat the owner.
For Hind alone we should all burn. For Hind Rajab, aged six. The chief and his thousand descendants say
I die, I die, I live, I live. Some translate it as a question, some with a we: will we die? Or will we live? Is this the paramedics come to save us? Is this our beloved’s celestial body, shining again?
Hinemoana Baker
Note: I realised when Paula contacted me that although I haven’t yet been able to write a poem solely addressing the genocide, Gaza is actually in almost all of the poems I’m currently writing in some way. This one above goes some way towards describing my experience of being anti-genocide and living in Germany. Germany is the second biggest military supplier to Israel after the USA. It’s also a country whose most left-wing party, Die Linke, has only in the last weeks taken a public stance against the genocide, and whose Green Party has actively supported it. This poem was first published by Starling in Feb 2025.
Pilates could happen to anyone after Tom Stoppard and Tusiata Avia, for H-J Kilkelly
1 H-J has her abs on two and a half springs and I have my phone on record in the black box under my reformer because I am going
to write a poem about Pilates I am going to juxtapose the instructions we are given with the text from the stories on my
Instagram feed and I am going to make a political point about the fucked interconnectedness of wellness and white
supremacy lines like
2 if you like to work hard choose the springs at the high end of the suggested settings and if you need to you can reduce
them halfway through the exercise please remember you should never feel any pain if you do stop straight away while talks of ceasefire remain
inconclusive Israel is invading Rafah offering hug a tree here’s what you need to know bomb kills at least twelve people including children at two displacement
camps in eastern Congo grit happens it’s hell week three hours from Auckland Discover New Caledonia back on the menu queen olives t zone tight all
eyes on Rafah the people of Gaza cannot wait they have nowhere else to go hug the moon the weather is grim but we’ll still do poetry lick your toe and wave
it around a bit goodbye to dopamine addiction with microlearning get the t-shirt springs women one to one and a half men one and a half to two
3 over soy flat whites we agree we busy our bodies to shush our minds our momentum has taken over we google Kathleen
Stanford Grant we discuss our complex apocalypse composting systems for entitled white men and their nice white lady friends because compost is better for the planet
than setting them on fire in a big bin and sitting on the lid smoking we have put a lot of thought into this how we would watch them break
down under a sprinkling of tino rangatiratanga equity and drag queen story times but this is a long term project and in the meantime we consider who we would smash first with our
plough refined guns and the answer is always the patriarchy we say it rolling our eyes in our heads on our bodies that we are wresting from their control
we say it like it’s a joke
4 Lying on your back on the reformer with your feet on the foot bar take the hand straps and take the arms straight
up to the ceiling tabletop position imprinted spine to make it easier make your teardrops smaller t zone tight exhale now reverse your
teardrops direction change the way the world works out pull the ribs to the hips inhale keep going returning back down curl up exhale
5 I cannot write a poem about Pilates
6 tho I have been writing this one in the shower where I usually write my PhD and in bed at night where I am
supposed to be doing sleep and behind my eyes where the tears live last week I got to hang with both
my grown up children and we walked safe down a safe street my counsellor thinks it’s a good idea to give the news a break
Liz Breslin from show you’re working out, Dead Bird Books, 2025
Will
30 September 2025
1. It’s simple, this word, it implies future intention wish
We say it with ease I will see you later He will get through We will be there We will be there
We say it quick, this confident contraction I’ll see He’ll get We’ll be We’ll be
2. Today, I listened to the will of a young girl written in June after two missiles struck her house she was pulled, then, with her brother Ahmed, from underneath rubble their survival a miracle
Three months later, another strike and now her will carries across a room with neatly ordered seats this purposeful body built from the rubble of 1945, willing security, and peace
The UN turns 80 this year Rasha was 10
3. I read the UN charter, the opening article underscoring collective will future intention wish
A poem is voice, is protest, is resistance and shouldn’t these lines also be said in sustained and repeated rhythm:
a call for collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace
Rasha, the girl who died today, wrote in her singular voice My will: If I become a martyr or pass away, please do not cry for me, because your tears cause me pain.
Rasha, the girl who died today, asked for her clothes, her things, her allowance her stories and notebooks to be given to other children: Ahmed, Rahaf, Sara, Lana, Betur
In Gaza, schools are makeshift emergency centres, shelters for too many they are no longer places for futures
In Gaza, the future is the question – and we must ask it: What will become of the children?
4. Rasha wrote in a single moment of determination and grace her will a statement for future specific use: And please do not yell at my brother Ahmed Please follow these wishes clarity, in terror, her words read to us and recorded because she died today
Rasha’s will is voice, is protest, is resistance a call for collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace
5. We call children wilful when we mean stubborn, headstrong even spoiled but what of a child living in a ruined world| where your will is all you have a world with no sense of future
In Rasha’s world survival was intention and caring for her brother was her last wish
6. And what of our easy forward-looking phrases amid Rasha’s rubble and burning skies, the burden of meaning: I will see you later He will get through
And what of the document written 80 years ago
And what of the future, the imperative call for collective measures We will be there We will be there
Michelle Elvy After hearing a speech delivered by Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency room physician from Chicago here
Gaza
This walking up and down will only wear a hole in the carpet It will not stop the murder It will not shame these men whose grannies wear brands on their arms These men do not indulge in rug-depleting reflection. They scheme brazenly they say wrong is right they say black is white their grifted arms rain down grief Do they not see that the world is mourning? Where is the umpire? The one who calls time?
Jan Farr
Child —Khan Younis, Gaza
I and a kinder world would address you Aisha | Dalia | Salma but you are unrecognisable, Child.
Forgive me. I do not know—believe me, I have searched, but could not find—your name. I turn
to my book of William Blake paintings, understanding I will not find you amongst its pages, nor any answers
to the questions I wake to each morning. Blake’s Song of Los is where I’m heading—those faltering
rays of light, that dark mountain looming. I lay my head on his cold stone altar, holler: I am sorry.
Child, I am sorry. I will do my best to paint you. How else to sing your life from the distant safety
of my island in the South Pacific? But, of course, we cannot restore what cannot be restored. I paint
nonetheless and at close of day kiss your brow, Child. You are swaddled again in the white robes
of innocence—silver and gold the ground that held you where you fell, gold and blue the firmament.
Only when I lay my brushes down do I notice your left hand folded in the position of a mudra,
thumb and forefinger lightly touching to form a mandorla, palm turned outward as if in blessing.
Blake’s Los urged us to revolution. It’s the revolution of keening I hear this evening in the softly falling rain.
Claire Beynon 2025
Gaza
We shriek and scream and holler and shout and sign petitions and hold placards and boycott and demand peace and listen to Gaza and weep
And our shrieks and screams and hollers and shouts our petitions and placards and boycotts our demands for peace and words and tears for Gaza
fall upon deaf ears
The borders are blocked food is scarce aid is stopped displaced families are murdered hospitals targeted under extensive ground operations
we are witnessing genocide
We will not stop shrieking and screaming and hollering and shouting and signing petitions and holding placards and boycotting and demanding peace and listening to Gaza and weeping
NZ Poetry Shelf 