No Other Place to Stand

An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand

Essa Ranapiri, Rebecca Hawkes, Jordan Hamel, Erik Kennedy, Essa Ranapiri, Rebecca Hawkes, Jordan Hamel, Erik Kennedy

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781776710898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

What, then, for the work of poetry? It's at the very periphery of popular speech, niche even among the arts, yet it's also rooted in the most ancient traditions of oral storytelling, no matter where your ancestors originate from. And, as we were reminded by an audience member at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival in 2020, who are we to say poetry cannot change the world?A poem may not be a binding policy or strategic investment, but poems can still raise movements, and be moving in their own right. And there is no movement in our behaviours and politics without a shift in hearts and minds. Whether the poems you read here are cloaked in ironic apathy or bare their hearts in rousing calls to action, they all arise from a deep sense of care for this living world and the people in it.Our poets are eulogists and visionaries, warriors and worriers. Most of all, they're ordinary people prepared to sit and stare at a blank page, trying to do something with the bloody big troubles looming over our past, present and future.— from the introduction by the editors

RANGI FAITH

Starlight Reserve

Takapō, 2020

How shall we save this land

for our children,

how to fill again those empty, silent nights,

find those bodies lost to the air

and dead water,

hear the sound of the last bird

and the last whale

that looked up for comfort,

for shelter,

to the lighted vault?

How should we save this land –

where men have hunted well

and lain down under the sacred cloak of stars

swimming like a sinuous golden eel

across the darkness

from Aoraki to the sea?

How to turn and wonder

at the starlight

that glittered through the years

on untouched ice, the face of mountains,

on lakes of clear, clean water?

How should we save

this earth

for our children?

DINAH HAWKEN

The uprising

Paekākāriki, 2013

1.

Here we are a skinny country

in the largest ocean on earth

spellbound, windswept, lashed.

The land is like a canoe heading south

to an icy continent or heading north to equatorial islands.

No one seems to know.

On Tuvalu the ocean is rising, in San Francisco

the ocean is rising, in Sydney the ocean is

rising, in Nagoya the ocean is rising

and here, in Paekākāriki, outside my window

the Tasman Sea, moon-bound, rises and falls.

It breaks up on the sea wall and falls.

2.

The land is like a seabird but where

are its wings? The land is like a fish.

The fish of Maui, hauled up from the sea floor, writhing.

The ocean is a road, a table and a bed.

It takes our bodies up to air and floats them.

The ocean is an open question.

The ocean is an open sewer. So far it takes

what it gets: toxins, dead zones, blasts,

oil, blooms, waste, drugs, radiation …

Our country is asleep – dreaming of a gull

that circles the Pacific, and circles every island.

Our country has forgotten where it lies.

3.

In Santiago the Pacific is rising,

in Majuro the Pacific is rising:

people leave when they cannot stay.

Around the rim, it calms and livens

human beings while we, its offspring, resourceful

and distracted, give back plastic and acid.

Fishing nets on the high seas are fifty kilometres long.

In the freedom of the high seas

a mass killing goes on, expertly, and on.

Today the sea came gently to the sea wall

and pulled back into itself

in the overall global uprising.

4.

With no motive and no name, the whole

indivisible ocean fits over the earth like a blessing:

it slips around, between and over

the territories we have made.

In its streams and drifts, free-range creatures

come and feed – and maybe go.

It shows up outside my window and,

though spellbound and moon-bound, is unbound

with a swell and momentum of its own.

It’s hard to have a mind for its envelopment

and treachery. Its weight, sheen, depth.

And its frank, cold-blooded flow.

5.

Our country is a park. We have the high

ground and the low ground. Our mountains

are peace flags and we’re free

to break out of bush, flax, pīngao

or any dead-end ideology

onto a charged and open-ended coast.

The land is like a knife, out

of its sheath and glinting in the sun.

I’d like to hold that pointed knife.

I’d like to speak with that knife.

I’d like to save a home, a tribe

and a heritage with that knife.

6.a.

But all I can do is rise:

both before and after I fall.

All I can do is rally,

all I can do is write

– I can try to see and mark

where and how we are.

All I can do is plant,

all I can do is vote

for the fish, the canoe, the ocean

to survive the rise and fall.

All I can do is plead,

all I can do is call …

6.b.

I’m getting warmer like the ocean

with this thin-bladed knife. I’m a full-time

mother with a fishwife’s tongue.

Under my grip is helplessness

but under that grip is an earthbound love

for this particular place in the ocean

whose shadow is on the wall

in my firmly gripped hand.

I vote with the hand that holds

this knife. I vote for the fish, the bird,

the ocean and a raised land shaped

by explosion, erosion and wilful life.

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA

he mōteatea: huringa āhuarangi

kei te tino wera haere

kei te tino wera haere

kei te tino wera rawa ināianei

kei te piki ake te moana

kei te piki ake te moana

kei te teitei kē rawa atu

kei te haere mai ngā tauraki

kei te haere mai ngā tauraki

ka noho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Rangi Faith
• Kahu Kutia
• Afterword
• About the Authors