xxxiii.

a poem about the weight of wood

native trees in their entirety

not like trees in H.R.Puffenstuff

(the talking variety)

but the energy within them

pushing out leaves in Spring, sap etc.

(like your email says)

energy derived from the heater up there

and the pull of the moon (not proven

but surely?) this heat goes into waves

and the things above them - air itself -

which gyres invisibly except for the things

it touches - leaves, branches, buildings

foundations for natural and human

constructions

some set to float by the measure

of the circumference of seas -

displaced in degrees

by wood and by land


Waka 87

I am the anonymous settler
fresh off the boat from Bristol,
arrived from a developed land
where the landscape
is landscaped, seating churches
and palaces, melodious clock towers,
aristocrats and Ascot, a land
where everything
has a place including the people.

Here we have tents and take food
from savages. The town is squatter
than Sydney. The English do not know
their stations any more.
My family will spend the next
century building this country
into a new England, and building
the mythology of England as home.


Note: Waka : Polynesian voyaging canoe

Robert Sullivan



Robert Sullivan has published two books of poetry with Auckland University Press, Jazz Waiata (1990) and Piki ake! (1993). A new book, Star Waka, is being published this year also by AUP. He was the University of Auckland Literary Fellow in 1998, has won or been a finalist for several national literary awards, and is a member of the Literature Committee of Creative New Zealand (the national arts council). He is of Nga Puhi Maori and Galway Irish descent. His work appears in the Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry and other literary journals here and overseas. He was born in 1967 and lives in Auckland with his partner and their two young children.