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.
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.
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
The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed. The respectability sound: is given as a familiar honking sound. Do not run, do not sing. The dearly-departed sound: is given as a rumble in the bones. Do not enter the coffin. The afterlife sound: is given as the music of the spheres. It will not reconstruct. The bordello sound: is given as a small child screaming. Do not turn on the light. The accident sound: is given as an ambulance sound. You can hear it coming closer, do not crowd the footpaths. The execution sound: is given as the sound of prayer. Oh be cautious, do not stand too near
or you will surely hear: the machinegun sound, the weeping mother sound, the agony sound, the dying child sound: whose voice is already drowned by the approaching helicopter sound: which is given as the dead flower sound, the warlord sound, the hunting and fleeing and clattering sound, the amputation sound, the bloodbath sound, the sound of the President quietly addressing his dinner; now he places his knife and fork together (a polite and tidy sound) before addressing the nation
and making a just and necessary war sound: which is given as a freedom sound (do not cherish memory): which is given as a security sound: which is given as a prisoner sound: which is given again as a war sound: which is a torture sound and a watchtower sound and a firing sound: which is given as a Timor sound: which is given as a decapitation sound (do not think you will not gasp tomorrow): which is given as a Darfur sound: which is given as a Dachau sound: which is given as a dry river- bed sound, as a wind in the poplars sound: which is given again as an angry god sound:
which is here as a Muslim sound: which is here as a Christian sound: which is here as a Jewish sound: which is here as a merciful god sound: which is here as a praying sound; which is here as a kneeling sound: which is here as a scripture sound: which is here as a black-wing sound: as a dark-cloud sound: as a black-ash sound: which is given as a howling sound: which is given as a fire alarm sound:
which is given late at night, calling you from your bed (do not use the lifts): which is given as a burning sound, no, as a human sound, as a heartbeat sound: which is given as a sound beyond sound: which is given as the sound of many weeping: which is given as an entirely familiar sound, a sound like no other, up there high in the smoke above the stars
Bill Manhire from Lifted, Te Herenga Waka University Press (VUP), 2005
At the weekend it felt like a monster had taken over all our rooms and was scoffing up joy and fortitude and hope and leaving dribbles of greed and ignorance and violence on the wooden floors. I got to thinking about protest. I got to thinking about the ban the bomb badges I pinned to my school bag in 1969. I got to thinking about the Vietnam protestors, Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, the women’s liberation movements, Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring. I got to think about doing my Italian doctorate and reading about clientelism, corrupt governments, writers who challenged injustice and inequity, as I considered the ink in the pen of Italian women writing across a century.
And I got to thinking about how we have never stopped writing protest poems in Aotearoa.
Like many others, my heart is breaking at the situation in Gaza and in the Ukraine, at the recent refusal of our coalition government to recognise the Palestine State, at Israel’s interception of aid and peace flotillas overnight. I can not stop mourning our inhumanity. The senseless murder and starvation of men, women, children, aide workers, journalists.
I decided to create a third new series on Poetry Shelf entitled Protest. I want to feature protest poems from various decades and I want to feature specific issues.
But what is a protest poem? Poetry protest can take many forms: from subtle spotlights to fierce outrage. Protest includes placards and banners with overt messages, loud and clear. It includes stories that render inhumanity, injustice and struggle visible, whether in journalism, fiction, poetry or the oral stories we share. But protest can also be concealed in symbols and parables, especially in societies run by despots and tyrants. I have been wondering if this might be in store for the USA.
Many of us are finding it impossible not to make room for protest in our writing, for grief and helplessness.
How to write in such damaged and damaging times?
Today I’m looking at damp patches of Waitākere sky with Jimmy Cliff on full volume, the words of beloved sixties and seventies song writers streaming in my ears, thinking Bob and Joni and Neil. And yes, it is a wide wide world, it’s a rough-rough road, and yes it’s still inhumane fighting, genocide, greed and abuse. Are we sitting in Jimmy’s limbo with the world on fire and entrenched suffering in the lands? Waiting for the dice to roll. Today even my morning is a dense dark heavy personal patch, but I’m thinking of Helen Clark, John Campbell, Anne Salmond, Tusiata Avia, the frontline workers, journalists, songwriters, politicians, poets, caregivers, forest and ocean guardians, so many people across the globe who are working against all odds to hold onto the light. To share the light. To gift the light.
I have decided to dedicate my first Protest post to Gaza (Friday Oct 3rd). I’ve already posted Gaza poems on the blog but I’ve decided to bring them together along with some 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.
Bill Manhire has posted a number of Gaza poems on social media and gave permission to repost one in tomorrow’s post, but he also mentioned how his poem ‘Hotel Emergencies’, a poem written during the Iraq conflict 20 years ago, “seems to live beyond its moment”. And I agree. And this is why I want to travel through the decades and revisit poetry protest across a century.
To have heard Bill read ‘Hotel Emergencies’ at a festival, one of my all-time go-to poems, was utterly memorable. You can listen to Bill read the poem. There are certain poems we carry with us, and for me this is one of them.
On Facebook this morning, Ariana Tikao mentioned going to the Catalyst 22 launch last night at Space Academy in Ōtautahai. She read her poem ‘Prayer’, a poem which “stitches together the memories held in the whenua at Ōnawe with the genocide taking place in Gaza right now”. She asks us where is the prayer that will forge peace. She speaks of the flotilla, of the suffering: unbearable unforgivable relentless.
And our hearts are breaking apart.
And we’ve got to speak shout sing and whisper, hold a vital light, hold our loved ones close, hold this precious day and take the next compassionate step whether fierce or gentle.
Let’s keep writing and sharing poetry. And protesting.
Peace 20 May
What if I made up a poem about a house on a hill with views of the sea and passionfruit vines laden, and a woman knitting stories of family connections and sublime epiphanies into socks and scarves and comfort blankets with an abundance of vegetables in garden plots and fruit on the trees and soup simmering whatever the season and how she is always content in her own company but one day she opens a newspaper and it is full of war and plague and bullies and hunger and racism and side-lined histories and abusive relationships, underfunded hospitals and underfunded schools, and she looks at the olive-green sea and she smells
the tomato soup simmering the fresh basil aromatic in the air and she turns on her radio and hears the voice of a young Palestinian student begging the world to listen, begging for freedom for her people and how the relentless bombs trap everyone in houses and how aid can’t get through and how nowhere is safe and how everywhere is under attack, and the woman on the hill tries to imagine the terrified children, the lack of news and power and water, and how the catastrophe goes deep into roots and land and home, and how they cannot pray safely in mosques, and how when Palestinians resist they are terrorists and their resistance is deemed invalid, and the woman on the hill looks
at the patch of blue sky and the free-floating clouds and puts down her knitting with its happy stitching its loving connections and storytelling skeins and tells the olive-green sea that we are all human, and we all need to eat and feel safe, to stand on soil we call home, to speak our mother tongues, tell our grandparent stories, and to feel the depth and caress of peace
Louis and I had this theory that nobody knew we were fucking. Uniforms could do that to a bloke — help him blend in with a crowd. Only once, at a party, did I ever see him without the shirt, collared and blue, the high socks and striped scarf. All day at school, stuffed and starved, I wanted to get them off him as a way of loving him in them. Later, those first February afternoons, our uniforms wilted in his room.
Nobody knew. But surely we inspired envy, our moody solitudes and companies — a chance hand on his chest, over the school crest — or our shining morning faces in the supermarket, shimmering back to us in the glass jars of olives. Behind us, watching, was Jackson McCarthy, noted homosexual. Eater of olives. Writer of poetry.
Jackson McCarthy
I read this poem first at a Starling launch party in August last year, and people really seemed to like it. It’s one thing when a poem ticks all your own personal checkboxes: desire, love, Death, time, boys, mysteries, the night, vision, dreams, happiness, the dark furniture of the radio, Arcadia, blue jeans, blond hair, the vantage point of language where words sound before they mean, the city, parties, Louis, inexplicable sorrow, the past, beauty, mirrors, consent, solitude, virginity, and you. But it’s another when a crowd of real-life people click with it, too.
I think of ‘Uniform’ as an Italian sonnet (or at least in its typographical layout it appears to be) — but then it gives us a sudden English turn at the end. And I think this formal arrangement is mimetic of the tricks the poem’s playing on its readers about author, speaker, and confession: you start the poem thinking it’s one thing, but finish realising it’s another. I was writing a number of free-verse sonnets at the time, which I felt a little guilty about: it’s like sonneteering on easy mode. But you need some sort of formal scheme, no matter how defanged, to give you resistance; something to write into. I found even the most basic measurement of the sonnet — the terminal volta at the thirteenth and fourteenth lines — to be extremely productive for a while. You do twelve lines, then you do a twirl.
I would like to think this poem has a bit of nice sound patterning, including that delicious internal rhyme in the eighth line that to my shock and horror sounds clearer, I think, than the rhyme between lines thirteen and fourteen. Well, I guess I honestly have no clue what I’m doing — but then again, I do trust my own taste, my only gift. You can’t decide in advance or preempt what mode of work will become available to you, but you can shape it with your good judgement. If I get stuck I go for a walk and think of beautiful things: boys’ faces, the music of Poulenc, my parents, the water, my life.
‘Uniform’ was first published in The Spinoff’s Friday Poem column; I’m grateful to Hera Lindsay Bird for choosing it.
Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he currently serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work here.
A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana Poems eds David Eggleton and Michelle Elvy At the Bay | I Te Kokoru, 2025
A Shell-Print of Waves – Aramoana Poems is like a poem travel guide that draws a particular place into view with a rich stitching of visual detail. The chapbook presents poems that came out of sessions run by David Eggleton, Michelle Elvy and Madeleine Child in Aramoana in April 2024 and April 2025. The venture was run in association with Wild Dunedin while the chapbook was supported by Ōtepoti Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.
Twenty-two poets step off from a place, Aramoana, to reflect and absorb: perhaps a writing exercise where you translate what is physically present through an array of senses, memory prompts, thought trails, word delights. A pocket guide book, and it feels like I have spent the weekend in a place unfamiliar to me. There are recurring motifs (how could there not be?): calm, storm, movement, constant change, sunlight, sky, birds, waves sand, sea. Every now and then, the presence of the writing circle filters through, exposing a process of seeing and doing.
I borrowed a few verbs from Michelle Elvy’s poem, ‘Waterways 2: our stories are wild weather’, to underline the way it’s a collection of shifting rhythms, as the poems burn grab ripple rumble puff weave carry nudge rainwash cloudswim swell pull dip.
Here’s a sample from Diane Brown’s ‘Not a matter of calm’, a poem that shifts and twists:
( . . .) We have come
to expect no day here the same. Sometimes a flat sea and sun to bathe in. Sometimes
we come face to face with wildness, sea lions, leopard seals, or our shadowy selves shifting course.
In ‘Between Aramoana Spit and Taiaroa Head’, David Eggleton amplifies both sound and image on the line, embedding the reader in a shadowy-rich scene. Here is the final stanza:
There’s a salty savour to the air; brine bubbles; the tide’s sheen glides up over the wet, flat sand. Shadows stretch estranged from what they shadow: the shadow of a flounder, the shadow of an albatross, shadow of macrocarpa, shadow of a channel marker, shadow of a cargo ship bearing logs into chasms of the night.
Gilbert May, as the cover shows, has produced the perfect line drawings and design for the subject matter. This gorgeous wee chapbook is a perfect treat to tuck into pockets for a dose of weekend travel. Maybe I’ll pick up a pen, look about me, reflect a moment, and start writing: the flat and the wild, the shadows and the cargo.
The first time I weighed myself I was a teenager. I was worried I was underweight for a blood drive. People told me I was pretty in high school. Thinking back all I hear is skinny. Being diagnosed with depression at 20, I was prescribed Lexapro. I gained close to 20kg. Being diagnosed with PCOS at 22, I was prescribed weight loss. I starved myself. It didn’t work. I went off Lexapro & starved myself again. This time the weight came off like limbs. See how I did that? A poem can survive things a body can’t. I hacked off my arms, my legs, my extra chin just to see the scale drop. This was always my destiny, being born in the year of the snake, to become all torso.
And I did, I did change my life.
I snapped the neck of gravity itself & called it
enjambment.
What do bodies become in a poem but symbolic against their will?
Look here — I set a cello on fire
& call it a woman.
Xiaole Zhan
Xiaole Zhan (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’, but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.
Well I thought I was going on a short hīkoi but I reckon this is turning out to be more of a haerenga, eh? Auē, auē, auē.
from ‘Left on Read’
Nicola Andrew’s terrific debut poetry collection navigates her experience being here and there, traversing bridges between living in both Tāmaki Makaurau and San Francisco, holding close being Māori, as her hīkoi widens to haerenga.
Poetry is the resonating bridge, the anchor, a form of home.
How to describe reading this book, the way it pulls you in with its sweet and sour simmer of wit and pain and acumen. Listen to Karl the San Francisco god doing a mihi in te reo, with his mantra of return. Or enter the abrasive rub of the gap between the powdered milk of a Henderson childhood, the chalky vase collectibles on Herne Bay shelves and the poet’s drive to scroll for vintage porcelain. Ah, how that blue butter dish the poet bids for is a repository of stories. And here I am again in the sweet and sour and crackle of here and there.
I bid on a blue butter dish, and consider my whanaunga, carving corridors through the sky, the flight path perhaps resembling the gently curved neck of a white swan.
from ‘Te Toi Uku’
Words substituted from Zoom transcriptions of interviews with Māori peers discussing Tino Rangatiratanga steer the poem, ‘Colonisation Via Transcription Algorithm’. Here is the heart of the book: it’s whānau, it’s “the whakapapa held close”, the “inherent sovereignty”. And it’s these vital words: “In fact, to be born Māori is a gift”. On the other side of the page, there’s a translation that splinters whānau and taonga and kaupapa to produce a different portrait of the modern, think pop-up blockers, digital data and pissing on the past. My heart is breaking.
And then I love love love reading ‘I Didn’t Come Here to Make F.R.I.E.N.D.S’, a poem that blasts the white saturation of Friends with a nod to fierce poems by Hera Lindsay Bird and Tim Grgec. How timely (when is it not?) to be reading of the hierarchical boxes that divide the dreams of children according to the colour of their skin. The poet is confessing that as a young girl she wanted to be a paleontologist but that too was a white saturated (male?) domain. So her mother took her out into the West Auckland garden to dig in the clay.
As I leaned the spade against the weathering fence I think I mumbled something about the improbability Of a dig succeeding without major grant funding But truthfully, I had just come to recognise That everything we claim as a discovery Is someone’s dear, once beloved
This book. This poetry. It’s poetry that’s laying down roots, stretching roots, recognising roots. Poetry as a way of opening more windows onto the insistent and continual habits of exploitation, inequity, hierarchies, stealing what is not ours, disrespecting degrading disenfranchising. It’s there in the Māori name Jeff Bezos gave his yacht. It’s there in the marae set ablaze.
And then, in this heart reading this mind travel, I am holding lines close, especially at a time when global and local darkness is intense:
[ . . .] The karanga is coming from inside, the whare that is your body / of water / of knowledge / of work— The karanga is coming from inside the whare, and I reach outwards to pry the door of you open, and remake myself, at home.
from ‘the tsunami warning is cancelled’
I turn the book sideways to read the middle section, the small bridge between Section One ‘Overseas’ and Section Two, ‘Experience’. And it’s the border patrol, the departure lounge, the safety video between here and there, And that is what reading this extraordinary book can do: send us sideways, startle, soothe, delight and ignite us, keep us reading and writing and speaking out. So many lines I want to quote to you from poetry that sends tendrils into both experience and wisdom, that opens windows wider onto a world that is personal, global and at unforgivable risk.
Nicola writes with her poetic ink infused with the pulse of her own heart, her whakapapa, and of the wider world both past and present, and it is utterly compulsive reading. I am so grateful for its existence and for Āporo Press.
A reading
‘Te Toi Uku’
‘Departure Lounge’
‘Defence Mechanism’
Nicola Andrews (Ngāti Paoa, Pākehā) is a poet, librarian and educator who grew up in Waitākere and currently works as a librarian in San Francisco. Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies, and they are the grateful winner of the 2023 AAALS Indigenous Writers’ Prize in Poetry. Most of their poems were written in the company of a very spoilt Siamese cat, with Overseas Experience being their first full-length poetry collection.
There’s no doubt that we’re all a bit swampy. You can smell it in the bog, the wet weeds, the rotted wood, the mud, the fish and the frog eggs, all the muck that lies at the bottom of the pond. Kathryn calls herself a goose. She’s still in love with Birdie Bowers, the way he used to talk with Jesus on the deck of the ship as the world filled up with ice. And so we continue our Socratic dialogue all the way to Springs Junction. Survival, they say, depends on making a list, so here we go: a hand-knitted tea-cosy, a canary water-whistle, glue made from flour and hot water you have to keep stirring or it will go all lumpy, some cut-out paper dolls and a couple of girl-detectives.
Bernadette Hall
Notes: The poem moves from the present to the past. Kathryn Madill and I shared an Antarctic Fellowship in 2004. The list takes me back to the 1950’s when post-war my world felt safe.
As I move towards my 80th birthday, it’s surprising how things from the past come round again. Yesterday at The Piano, the Jubilate Singers performed a poem that was published in my first book, HEARTWOOD, published by Caxton Press in 1989. The composer, Richard Oswin, lives in Christchurch. His interpretation was delicious. I have done a lot of editing, blurbing and launching this year, all good fun. Pakiaka by Gabrielle Huria, published by Canterbury University Press, was a highlight. It’s an exquisite book. Here’s something of what I wrote for it. ‘How gracefully they walk together on these pages, te reo and English. Arm in arm. So proud, so strong. There’s an energy that blitzes. I’ve been waiting for words like these. They take me right down into the roots of this place where I live not far from the sacred mountain.’ These are my values. An edited version appears on the book’s cover.
NZ Poetry Shelf 