In November I decided I would do my tiny bit towards the #ceasefirenow protest movement for Gaza by posting one poem by a Palestinian poet a day on my public Facebook wall. I’m introverted so I’m not a natural placard-waving protestor (although I admire those who do protest). Bearing daily witness, and inviting others to do so if they wished to, seemed like something I could do. Thank you to Paula Green for inviting me to choose five poems to repost here on NZ Poetry Shelf, meaning that the important things these poets have to say can reach a wider audience.

Kiri Piahana-Wong

The Poets

Khaled Juma

Khaled Juma is a Palestinian poet and writer of children’s books. He is a long-term resident of Gaza city and was born in Rafah.

Oh rascal children of Gaza. You who
constantly disturbed me with your
screams under my window. You who
filled every morning with rush and
chaos. You who broke my vase and
stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back, and scream as you want
and break all the vases. Steal all the
flowers. Come back … just come back …

Mahmoud Darwish

Revered writer Mahmoud Darwish is regarded as Palestine’s national poet. He wrote of the anguish of dispossession and exile, and has been described as ‘an utterly necessary and unforgettable voice.’

From ‘Under Siege’ [extract]
Translated by Marjolijn De Jager

***

You who stand in the doorway, come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
And you will sense that you are men like us
You who stand in the doorways of houses
Come out of our morningtimes,
We shall feel reassured to be
Men like you!

***

A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.

***

When the planes disappear, the white, white doves
Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven
With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession
Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves
Fly off. Ah, if only the sky
Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me].

***

Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel
Soldiers piss — under the watchful eye of a tank —
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass…

***

If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
[So spoke a woman
to her son at his funeral]

***

My friends are always preparing a farewell feast for me,
A soothing grave in the shade of oak trees
A marble epitaph of time
And always I anticipate them at the funeral:
Who then has died…who?

***

Writing is a puppy biting nothingness
Writing wounds without a trace of blood.

***

Our cups of coffee. Birds green trees
In the blue shade, the sun gambols from one wall
To another like a gazelle
The water in the clouds has the unlimited shape of what is left to us
Of the sky. And other things of suspended memories
Reveal that this morning is powerful and splendid,
And that we are the guests of eternity.

Hiba Abu Nada

Hiba Abu Nada was a poet and novelist. Her novel ‘Oxygen is not for the dead’ won second place in the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2017. Hiba died on October 20^th in an airstrike that hit her home in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. She was 32 years old.

These are her last words posted online on 8th October:

Gaza’s night is dark
apart from the glow of
missiles, quiet apart
from the sound of explosions,
terrifying apart from the
comfort of prayer, black
apart from the light of
the martyrs. Good night,
Gaza.

Basma Al-Mashrawi

Basma Al-Mashrawi is a young poet and novelist.

Where to walk? All roads are
paved with glass. Where to cry?
all hearts are made of stone.
where to go? All of the land is a
ruin.

Sara Abou Rashed

Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian American poet and storyteller.

I’m Told I Have a Clear Sense of Purpose
(Translation by the author)

There is no room in my house
for uselessness. I have lost.
Years ago, in ceramics class,

my friends shaped mud
into asymmetrical statues,
called them pure art, abstract decor.

I made dishes, a toothbrush holder,
a jewellery box and its lid.
Don’t blame me, even the screws

in my walls carry more weight
than intended. On the internet,
I found videos of my house

turned museum for what isn’t there.
My old kitchen now a skeleton,
bones stripped naked

of cement and copper wires. Still,
I don’t curse the revolution, the war,
the thieves or the regime; I curse only

myself—all these cracked tiles
and the probable risk of death
by electrocution for a day’s
worth of bread.

Hoof, Kerrin P Sharpe, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

the blackbird mistakes

the blackbird mistakes
my blank page for snow
his wings shadow my pencil

my hand becomes a beak
my spine hollow bones
and feathers of a blackbird’s hump

he peck-pecks the paper
like rain   sleet   hail

I write tree
                 he’s in the branches
I write house
                 he’s on the roof
I write garden
                 he’s found a worm

now the poem’s
a blackbird’s watch-tower
a waiting room so cold

his gizzard rattles
the oldest song
it should be snowing

when I write sky
as quick as a full-stop
he’s back in the world

his eyes white blades
on the horizon

Kerrin P.Sharpe, from Hoof

Kerrin P. Sharpe’s new collection, Hoof, is “an invitation to travel by train through the poet’s world”. What an appealing idea. There are three sections, like three legs of a journey, with each stage beginning with a dedicated train poem. These poems establish the rhythm of travel, the musicality of movement, the way a poem is a sequence of windows offering shifting views. Rhyme compounds like the sound of wheels on track. We are moving through place, memory, experience, and it is immensely satisfying.

I write the word “original” on my notepad. “Original”, a word that went out of fashion for awhile, a fugitive idea where everything we write resists what precedes, but I am embracing this notion, this sense of “original”. Embracing the multiple possibilities of the word, let’s say the meeting place of not-replica, free spirit, individual, authentic, fresh, origin-al. I am holding Kerrin’s collection of poetry and it is like seeing things for the first time. I was delighted to read the Lynley Edmeades endorsement on the back of the book: “One of the most original and idiosyncratic voices currently writing in New Zealand.”

Take the poem, ‘the blackbird mistakes’, such an original take on writing poetry, it makes my skin prick, my heart beat faster, there on the poetry tracks of travel. I got permission to include the whole poem so you can read it for yourself.

If I muse on the resonance of train journeys, I muse on the connecting beat, the sense of concatenation where an image taps gently against the next image, a rebounding echo that sustains, that might be motif or object or image or sound. In a cluster of poems, my eye moves from branch to forest to trunk to trees. Through the window, through the window, the rhythm pulling me along the poetry tracks.

What we see through Kerrin’s windows of travel is eclectic: Antarctica, the parent’s head stone, hospitals, brides, horses, ice, a penguin, sunlight, Ted Hughes, Rita Angus, Benedict Cumberbatch. Startling images, stillness, activity, presence, absence. What we fall upon, as happens for many travellers, is the fertility of the gap alongside the reward of the connection.

The mesmerising cover, designed by Spencer Levine, comprises photos by Roland Searle that are housed at Te Papa: North Island steam train, 1920s–1930s, North Island lake, 1920s–1930s, Wanganui River, 1920s to 1930s. Another rewarding way to approach the poetry.

Hoof is sublime; it is waking up in the lifting light of poetry, seeing through the windows, enhancing energy, advancing heart. I love this original collection so much.

Kerrin P. Sharpe is the author of four previous poetry collections, most recently Louder. Her poems have appeared in local and international literary journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, POETRY (US), Blackbox Manifold, PN Review and Stand. Her work has been anthologised in Best New Zealand Poems six times, Best of Best New Zealand Poems, Oxford Poets 2013, 150 Essential New Zealand Poems and A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005–2019. In 2021 she held a writing residency at the Michael King Writers Centre. 

Te Herenga Waka University page

Human Arcs

My love is like the clown from Sesame Street who takes his make-up off backward with red, white, and black tubes and looks tired and stark when he starts and tired and stark and naked when he finishes 

But, 
My heart is like the perfectly healthy premolar that cracked to the root when I bit a carrot stick. The dentist said it was a very deep tooth, so the sides were too steep and, therefore prone to cracking. ACC is paying for a new one because I fell over carrying a yucca a few weeks earlier but I still feel like a scammer; it’s my tooth’s fault for not being built right
My heart constantly feels pressure similar to what the implant specialist applied to the half tooth still anchored in my head. I was unsedated, so my memory is accurate. I kept thinking about the bond between the broken tooth and my gum; how much fight there was to stay connected

But I, 
Afterward, I joked that the platinum screw will make my skull better looking to archeologists. Michael, the specialist laughed and said ancient Egyptians experimented with shell and bone tooth implants. ‘Oh they never worked’, he said, ‘but it’s still impressive’. I know my heart will also be found because it has calcified. I’ll leave instructions in my will for the cracks to be filled with gold, or hot glue gunned diamantes

But I still, 
My love is like a stupid fucking pen that lives in my bag and only works if you hold a finger on the back end when writing, so, actually, it doesn’t work. At every critical moment, I’ve needed a pen it’s been the only one there, and I’ve tried writing this three times with the pen now

But I still love,
My love is like the scandalously expensive refurbishment of 11 Downing St; fern wallpaper, eco-conscious rattan, and fabrics starting at 100 pounds a meter, ordered by the recent fiance of the recently divorced Prime Minister. Deeper down, the structural foundations of No11 were laid while slavery was legal, which was so profitable our ancestors took centuries to admit it was profoundly immoral. Evil. 
It’s been proposed the slow arc of the moral universe bends towards justice (I don’t pretend this is a fact). What if each human is an arc, and our decisions could be light and rain?

But I still love you,
I think of the way I loved you when it was last possible to say I love you without feeling like a fraud, without the horror of failing to protect you, and I want to curl up like a nematode in a human eyeball. The RNZ expert explaining nematode worms warned listeners to put our sammies down. I felt it then, now, and whenever I think of you or what happened, a pulse against the curve of my eyeball, something alive I can’t get rid of easily, bigger than it should be, with a will of its own, too foul to hear of while eating

But I still love you, kids

Simone Kaho

Simone Kaho is a writer, multimedia journalist, and poet who creates work at the intersection of politics, art, and storytelling. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters and has published two books of discontinuous narrative poetry, Lucky Punch in 2016, and HEAL! in 2022. 

‘Live from Gaza’ Sara M. Saleh, from The Flirtation of Girls (UQP, forthcoming 2023)

Sara M. Saleh is a human rights lawyer, organiser, writer, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. She has been anthologised widely and her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in English and Arabic in Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Red Room Poetry, Kill Your Darlings, Rabbit Poetry Journal, and SBS, amongst others. She is co-editor of the groundbreaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other. She has run poetry workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals across the country.

Sara made history as the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review’s 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. Her debut novel Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press) is out in August this year and a full-length poetry collection, The Flirtation of Girls (UQP), is forthcoming. Sara lives on Bidjigal land with her partner and their cats, Cappy & Lola.

This is the first time I have posted poems by children on Poetry Shelf. I post a monthly poem challenge on Poetry Box for children from Year 0 to Year 8. I pick some favourites to post and give some books away. For my last challenge for 2023 I invited children to write Earth poems – poems that celebrate what they love about Earth but that might also speak about a world under threat.

I commissioned three terrific young artists to do illustrations for it and for my wrap-up post for the year (Postcards 2023). Oscar and Max, both aged 12, have sent in magnificent artwork for the posts (Earth poems up next week and Postcards 2023 the week after) … but they also wrote their own Earth poems.

I felt so moved to read these, to be transported to their rural scenes, to find infectious joy in family life, and to be aware of the tough world challenges from war to hunger to climate change. I felt so moved that these two young writers offer hope in a time when we crave it. This is what poetry can do.

Hope

White flowers bloom in summer wind.
A quiet hum blows throughout a different kind of kin.
A breeze, a gale? Another kind of hail, or just a veil?
From where we are, the plants will grow, cats and birds live in tow.
Summer days and summer laughs, for most of us good times are free, but
for some just putting food on the table is a hefty fee.
Life isn’t all bad though, the sun shines and people grow, good triumphs
over evil and…I hope happiness will show.

Yet! … On the other side of the world, people fight, bombs blow up,
children have to wonder if they’ll see another night.
Wars fuelled by hate, racism, and enemies of the state.
But don’t just sit there, don’t just mope, don’t just blame the person in power.
For we’re the ones who let them devour.
So act… Don’t let people fight, don’t let the world end tonight!
Climate change is round the bend. Our world’s beautiful don’t wait till the end!

But, what can this poem do?
I’m just me, and you’re just you.

Yet, I have a hope of a world of peace and prosperity, free of the fear
and hate that could and can be our fate. Racism and stereotypes fade away.
And while the future seems to be paved in an endless sea of darkness
and doom for you and me.
I hope that my vision will come true,

And you’ll see where happiness can be.

Oscar Davis

Oscar Davis is aged 12 and in Year 7, Mission Heights Junior College. He likes drawing, reading, being out on the farm with all the birds and the animals. And he love being with his cat, Meeno. His favourite thing about 2023 has been drawing.

I am from ….

I am from a big old home
With lush valleys all around.
Far as the eye can see.
Fences piercing up the land.
Creatures and trees in every crevice.

I am from the country with long white clouds overhead.
Sandy hot beaches everywhere you look.
A distinct culture like no other.
Enormous forests everywhere, glistening with animals.

I am from an amazing place with loving people all around.
Aunties, uncles, cousins, grandpas, grandmas
crazy, cool, amazing, funny, enjoyable.
Endless laughter all around.
The best family around because it’s mine.

I am from an endless banquet of delicious food.
A sea of exquisite food for me to devour.
A flavour explosion happening in my mouth.
It is always the best when it’s Mum’s home cooking.

Max Davis

MAX, is aged 12, and in Year 7 at Mission Heights Junior College. He likes drawing, thinking of stories to write, hanging out with his friends, having adventures on the farm with his pet cat, Meeno. His favourite thing about 2023 has been listening to creepy and spooky stories.

At the Point of Seeing, Megan Kitching,
Otago University Press, 2023

Once, when I asked a boy from Hong Kong
what new things he’d seen here,

he answered, ‘the moon’.

 

from ‘Dark Skies’

I recently reviewed Giselle Clarkson’s dazzling children’s book, The Observologist (Gecko Press, 2023) on Poetry Box. I love this book for a universe of reasons, including the vital relationship between observing and writing poetry:

I love the idea of being an observologist – a person who makes tiny scientific expeditions every day. It taps into notions of looking, of slowing down to observe, wonder, take note of. To see and discover the world up close with fresh and fascinated eyes. To be a conservationist. One part of me thinks a poet is an observologist because every day when I write a tiny poem it is like a tiny expedition and as I look and listen I discover surprising things.

Megan Kitching’s debut collection, At the Point of Seeing, as the title so aptly suggests, is a book of observation, a handbook on slowing down to see the world. Reading Megan’s poetry splinters immunity to the daily view, the window vista, the routine route. Looking becomes poetry and poetry becomes a source of fascination, nuances, wonder. It might be poetry as contemplation, whether reading or writing, and in that contemplation, in that slow and steady homage to the physical world we inhabit, we are returned to its beauty. In this time of unbearable inhumanity, planet selfishness, personal profit, ugly behaviour, At the Point of Seeing, is a reminder of hope.

In ‘Volcanic Harbour’, the speaker might “sit on a stone and let time work”. I become participant as I too find a “stone” to sit on, and let the poetry work along with time. I move from shells in a museum, to pūhā musings, to a rounded hill, the prevailing wind, horses in a paddock, an albatross curving, muslin rain, macrocarpa that “claw the sky”.

Megan is deft with words. I am trying to think of a poet who achieves such surprise and wonder on the line. Perhaps Emma Neale, perhaps Bill Manhire, Bernadette Hall. So often the next word is not the expected word, it takes me by surprise and that is reading delight. It might be adjective, verb, image evoked, trope. And that is in itself a performance of the awe of seeing through word selections. The way the albatross arc catches our breath, the crawling bee mesmerises.

A morning rain of muslin, hardly there
except in the pinprick flicker, a thickening
of the air.

 

from ‘Mornington

I also read this sumptuous collection as musical sound track, and again it produces wonder, delight, sonic surprise. It is a sweetly mixed playlist as we move from assonance, to rhyme, near rhyme, alliteration, aural dip and lift and slide. It is writing on the wire. It is scoring the world, it is intricate melody, it is open tuning.

Ah. I am pitching this book to you, when against all odds, poetry is a lifeline, the source of joy, the connecting force, the point of contemplation. We are at the point of seeing, we are at the point of speaking, sharing, hoping, and poetry such as this, poetry as good as this, makes all the difference.

You can hear Megan read here.

In that wavering horizon,
where the merest snap loomed
I found a dull, sedate beauty,
an abundance of swans.

Yes, despite the red fire flush
tipping the succulent wort
and a stilt’s elegant flight
the marsh was flat, almost poetry.

 

from ‘The Inlet’s Shore’

Megan Kitching was born in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland and now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has appeared in The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Poetry New Zealand, and Landfall. “The horses,” published in takahē 95, was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident. At the Point of Seeing is her debut collection.

Otago University Press page

Te Reo
 Māori

(for Linda and Warahi Paki)

The year after I left school
like a spinning top

adrift from lessons,

I went back at night
to learn te reo
 Māori
because I wanted to hear
the word ‘table’ and speak
the word ‘ground’

in the language closest

to home,

and to make

my own way

south.

The year I went to university

I chose Italian

because I wanted to read

Se una notte d’inverno una viaggiatore
in Calvino’s words
and it didn’t feel right then
to speak the word ‘whenua’
in my Pākehā skin.

This year

when I have learnt how to plant
broccoli and savoy cabbages

a stone’s throw from the city,
I will go back at night

to learn te reo Māori

because I want to hear

the word ‘table’ and speak

the word ‘ground’

in the language
that is home.

Paula Green 2013
from The Baker’s Thumbprint, Seraph Press, 2013

nerve

I duck my head when the moon is low.
my hushed-counterpart takes shallow breaths
I fracture, dig, accelerate, allow
I eat the idea of him
& it cuts my stomach

I laugh & I lose.
the yellow-bellied horizon is bursting
with wildflowers and intestinal storm clouds
my body is a raw, exposed nerve pink in a nest
of dark, curling leaves and branches.

Elliot Harley McKenzie

Elliot McKenzie (they/them) is a poet who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Their
poems have previously been published in Starling, Tarot, Sweet Mammalian and
Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems. This year their poem won the given words National Poetry Day competition. Their poetry is inspired by love, heartbreak, queer identity, ecology and visual art.

Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry in Aotearoa,
edited by Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor
Auckland University Press, 2023

Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry in Aotearoa, edited by Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor, includes poems by almost 100 poets. So what is performance poetry? Performance poetry brings poems off the page whether under the tags: performance or slam (think slam competitions) or spoken word. It might be personal, it might political, or a mix of both. It might be out-to-the-edge-of-the-solar-system radical or rebellious. It might be holding-the-hand-of-the-person-next-to-you heartbreaking. It might make you laugh out loud or move your hips in time to the beat.

Listening to performance poetry is a means of transportation, elevation, challenge, reconfiguration, pleasure, world and self expanding … and yes! POETRY JOY!

Performance poetry in Aotearoa ranges from the exuberant dazzle of Show Ponies to the skin tingles of Tusiata Avia’s Wild Dogs Under my Skirt to poetry at festivals such as WOMAD, those in the big cities, those in the small towns, slams, open mic nights, to supportive communities such as Rising Voices Youth Movement, South Auckland Poets Collective, New Zealand Young Writers Festival, Stand Up Poetry and many many more. Performance poetry is alive, vital, wide ranging in Aotearoa.

“These poems riot in harmony,” Carrie and Grace say in their introduction. The editors invited poets to send in poems and then selected those that leapt off the page for them. Carrie and Grace remind us that performance poetry has been the poor cousin of published poetry, but that poets such as Sam Hunt, Tusiata Avia and Selina Tusitala Marsh have taken poems off the page and shared with the world in electrifying and heart catching ways. The anthology is in three sections: Burn it down / Float / Re-earth your roots.

The result is a means of body and heart transportation, elevation, challenge, reconfiguration, pleasure, world and self expanding … POETRY JOY!

Current New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse has written a foreword that resonates with me on a number of levels. It is personal and it chimes with my view of reading, writing, creating and performing poetry. He talks about a Facebook comment that stuck when someone claimed Chris’s poem was more like a story! The comment got him musing on what poetry is. In the end, and it is what guides me as a poet and as a poetry reviewer, the key thing is what does poetry do. For me, it is an open space, an invitation to discover, experiment, play, to take risks, to find comfort. There are ZERO rules. Working with children over the past decades, I know the power of poetry to nourish self, to open windows, build travel routes, self confidence, self bloom. When Chris writes this, my heart moves: “Poetry has been that lifeline for me at various points in my life, and while I write mostly for the page, there’s no denying that getting to perform my work has played an important part in my growth as a poet and as a person.” Yes!

Auckland University Press has produced a sweet book to hold in the hand, great paper stock, striking cover and perfect internal design (by Seven.co.nz), with a hard cover and plenty of photographs and posters.

What better way to celebrate the arrival of this stunning anthology with a reading in the Poetry Shelf Cafe. This morning I have been in my cafe listening again, in the time when I most need poetry, and here I am boosted by the power of poetry performance. Thank you for your mahi, your aroha, your joy. Take a listen! Then take a read!

The editors

Carrie Rudzinski has performed her work over the past 17 years in six countries and has been featured in Bustle, HuffPost and Teen Vogue. She ranked 4th in the world at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam, won the 2019 Pussy Riot Award at Auckland Fringe Festival, and co-founded Auckland’s JAFA Poetry Slam. Her poems have been published in Landfall, The Spinoff, Stasis Journal, Catalyst and Muzzle, among others. She is the author of seven books and five spoken word albums, and from 2016–2020 she taught the only spoken word course offered at a tertiary level in Oceania at Manukau Institute of Technology. Carrie is the co-creator of three poetry theatre shows – How We Survive (2019), The Bitching Hour (2023) and Hysterical (2022) – the latter of which won Best New Aotearoa Play at the Wellington Theatre Awards and Outstanding Performance Poetry at Auckland Fringe Festival.

Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan, is an artist of upu/words on the page, digital storytelling and live performance, and is dedicated to carving, elevating, and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. She is a recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016, and highlights of her work include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2018, and being a co-founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aotearoa, Rising Voices (2011–2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective. She has published two collections, Afakasi Speaks (2013) and Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press, is the writer of My Own Darling commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019), and curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020 & Kia Mau Festival 2021). Alongside Dr Lana Lopesi, she is co-director of Flying Fetu Festival, dedicated to building abundant futures for Moana artists of upu/word. Grace is currently working on her next body of work, ‘Water Memories’.

Auckland University Press page

The readings

Tamara Tulitua

Tamara reads ‘y/ours not mine’

Tamara Tulitua flows from the villages of Safa’ato’a, Gagāifo, Matāutu, Sapāpali’i, Vailima and Tanugamanono in Sāmoa to her birthplace Aotearoa New Zealand. Tamara writes across fiction, poetry, essay forms. She is a graduate of law and politics from Te Herenga Waka|Victoria University of Wellington and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Te Pūtahi Tuhi Auaha o Te Ao|International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). She was the IIML Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence in 2022. Her reviews, fiction, prose/poetry have appeared in anthologies, literary journals and other online publications including Pantograph Punch, Turbine|Kapohau and the Post. Tamara is the founder and facilitator of Vāhui, a collective of Māori/Moana writers.

Hala Nasr

Hala reads ‘To death, we crawl’

Hala Nasr is an Egyptian poet born and raised on the coastal North Shore of Tāmaki Makarau, Aotearoa. Exploring themes of diaspora, solidarity, womanhood, and difference, her poems appear in We Call to the Eye & the Night – Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage and Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand. In a past life, Hala performed her poetry solo and with DECOLONISE poetry collective (co-founded with Jahra Wasasala and Logan Dobson) at events including Pasifika, Auckland Fringe festival, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland Town Hall, and Herald Theatre.

Amber Esau

Amber reads ‘Shapeshifter’

Amber Esau is a Sā-Māo-Rish (Ngāpuhi / Manase) writer of things from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She is a poet, storyteller, and professional bots. Always vibing at a languid pace, her work has been published both in print and online.  

Carrie Rudzinski

Carrie reads ‘Always a Godmother / Never a God’ from her album Goddess Bound with original music by Jason Anderson. Photo credit Andi Crown.

(see bio above)

Renee Liang

Renee reads ‘Chinglish’

Renee Liang is a poet, playwright and essayist. She has toured eight plays and collaborates on visual arts works, dance, film, opera, community events and music. Some poetry and short fiction are anthologised. A memoir of motherhood, When We Remember to Breathe, with Michele Powles, appeared in 2019. In 2018 she was appointed a Member of the NZ Order of Merit for services to the arts.

Ben Brown

Ben reads ‘A silent poem’

Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki, Ngāti Paoa) was born 1962 in Motueka, which is further away from him now than he cares to think about. He has been writing all his life for his own enjoyment and published his first children’s book in 1991. He is an award winning author who writes for children and adults across all genres, including poetry, which he also enjoys performing. Generally, if pressed, he will have something to say about anything. In May 2021 he was made the inaugural NZ Reading Ambassador for Children – Te Awhi Rito. He is also a father of two, which he considers his best work to date. He lives in Lyttelton.

Daren Kamali

Daren reads ‘Con-olized’

Daren Kamali – Fijian born New Zealander – lover of words – art – family and Pacific culture. A researcher and multidisciplinary revival artist – poet. Worked in the GLAM sector for over a decade now.. published several poetry collections and recorded musical albums since 1998. writers residencies include – Pacific Writer in Residence at University of Hawai’i -Manoa – 2012 and International Writers Festival 2014 at University of Iowa. Masters in Creative Writing – A Class Honours – University of Auckland 2016. Senior Librarian Pacific – Public Engagement 2017-2023.

Speak the Mountain

for dear Banu

There is a mountain
There is a river
There is a lake

Hold the weeping child to heart
Hold the thirsty and the wounded to heart
Hold the dead and the fearful also to heart
Hold the rubble home and the broken bones

We speak the mountain
We speak the blood river
We speak the grief lake

Marching peace
Marching heart
Marching out

There is a mountain
There is a river
There is a lake

Paula Green