In conversation with Vaughan Rapatahana

Kiri Piahana-Wong: Ngāti Ranginui

KPW: I work as a freelance editor and book project manager; I’ve also run Anahera Press, a small press dedicated to publishing Māori and Pasifika poetry, since 2011. I am a poet with one full-length collection, Night Swimming (2013), and a second, Tidelines, very close to completion. I live in Tāmaki Makaurau with my partner and 2-year-old son.

KPW: Where it feels natural to me to include te reo Māori in my poetry, then I include it, but I don’t try to force it. I am not fluent so I am more likely to include single words rather than full stanzas. I do very much admire poets who use te reo extensively in their work.

KPW: It is so important for us to have writing in te reo Māori. It’s impossible for Māori culture to be strong and vital without the language being strong and vital. It is most important that this writing comes from Māori writers. It’s good if Pākehā want to learn te reo, but in terms of telling Māori stories, about our experiences, our culture, and our people, that should come from us, in my opinion.

KPW: In 2018 I was published in the groundbreaking anthology Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation. My poetry has been published in more than fifty journals and anthologies, including Landfall, Essential NZ Poems, Puna Wai Kōrero, Solid Air and Poetry NZ. This year I have been co-editing Ora Nui, NZ’s only Maori literary journal, with Anton Blank. This edition of the journal is a collaboration with the indigenous Taiwanese, and is being co-published in Taiwan. I have also previously edited editions of JAAM Magazine and Flash Frontier. I have been doing a lot of poetry judging this year. I judged the Open Section of the NZ Poetry Society’s annual competition earlier in the year, and I am a judge for the Poetry Prize for the Ockham NZ Book Awards. The winner of this prize will be announced in May next year.

New Poetry

Piha

There is a small blue pot, filled with daisies 
picked from the roadside, sitting on the 
windowsill, framed by plywood, glass, 
the dim, warm, pre-cyclone light
—it is mid-afternoon.

There are grapes, not yet ripened, hanging
on a trellis above me, the trellis covered in
clear plastic, giving the illusion of open
space, protecting me from the rain.
Behind me, pōhutukawa are flowering,
our brilliant red Christmas trees.

Because yes it is Christmas,
it is Christmas Eve, and this is where 
I start to lose it, I stop looking and
start listening, I’m listening to you
drumming, Ahurewa singing, and 
while I want to describe the precise 
nature of the sound, what I can hear, 
all I am thinking is

—nobody plays the drums like you do

       and then I’m lost, you see,
I want to be lost and I am lost
              and I'm                            gone.


Sometime later I come back to myself
to the sound of flowers. I am in a high
place, close to the sky.

There are light green leaves above me, 
as perfect as stencils. There is a creeper
growing, wrapping itself tenaciously
around the trunk, the limbs, of a pūriri 
tree. I think the vine is winning, it is
smothering the tree, but then I see no,
the tree is still strong, although part of it
looks dead, and then I wonder if nature
even thinks like that.

And I'm a part of nature too, never more so
than now, this day, this pre-cyclonic post-
apocalypse-that-never-came rainy early-
summer Christmas Eve, this early evening/afternoon.

  There is more rain falling now.

                It runs in rivulets from the top of your head
    down the bridge of your nose
                    onto my half-open mouth, running over
 my lips, and it runs over my chin and
                                               it runs down my body and pools
                     in my centre, and then as I turn over to
            press my face, my warm, bare face, against the
                                               grass, dying leaves, the earth, I feel it
                           —the sky’s water: all the wondrous light
                      weeping joyous tears of the sky god, 
                      Ranginui, running down my side and
        into the earth, Papatūānuku, and then
                                                                                 settling there.