Sestinas

The winds of spring are starting
Even in June to blow
From a wild sky, and round this house
Where a cat sleeps on a bed
And my friends bring me in some kai,
Goat chops roasted a bit too much

In our family oven. But that’s not much
To gripe about. When we were starting
Here we often had no kai
Except onions, and the rain would blow
Through broken windows. Now I lie on a bed
In what the cops would call my house

Though it is in fact a Maori house
Under the wing of the marae too much
For many to like it. The church would give us a bed
Of nails to lie on, the State would like to see me starting
An army borstal. Let the wind blow
From the Maori hill and we will get our kai,

Our houses, our freedom. Tank our friend brings kai
Up from the pa. Father Te Awhitu patched this house
Chopping timber blow by blow
When the pakeha farmers would not have given as much
As a cup of tea. Now the tree is starting
To sprout from its ramshackle seedbed,

The love of the many. I can lie in bed
Under blankets and eat for a kai
The goats my friends have shot, while slips are starting
To block the river road. This old Maori house
Is the mother’s lap where the child learns as much
As he is able, and the June rains blow

Harmlessly. I wait for God’s breath to blow
Life into the body of a culture on its deathbed
Or else, Frank, for those who have had to bear too much
To make a new start, share their clothes and kai,
Put down mattresses in every meeting house
And build their own canoe. It’s difficult starting

Anything new, yet the wind starting to blow
From the house of the sun will tumble the saints out of bed.
It’s wise to eat one’s kai and not say too much.

I want to go up the river road
Even by starlight or moonlight
Or no light at all, past the Parakino bridge,
Past Atene where the tarseal ends,
Past Koroniti where cattle run in a paddock,
Past Operiki, the pa that was never taken,

Past Matahiwi, Ranana, till the last step is taken
And I can lie down at the end of the road
Like an old horse in his own paddock
Among the tribe of Te Hau. Then my heart will be light
To be in the place where the hard road ends
And my soul can walk the rainbow bridge

That binds earth to sky. In his cave below the bridge,
Where big eels can be taken
With the hinaki, and the ends
Of willow branches trail from the edge of the road
Onto the water, the dark one rises to the light,
The taniwha who guards the tribal paddock

And saves men from drowning. Down to Poutini’s paddock
The goats come in winter, and trucks cross the bridge
In the glitter of evening light
Loaded with coils of wire, five dogs, and wood
they have taken
From a rotten fence. On the bank above the road
At the marae my journey ends

Among the Maori houses. Indeed when my life ends
I hope they find room in the paddock
Beside the meeting house, to put my bones on a road
That goes to the Maori dead. A gap I cannot bridge,
Here in the town, like a makutu has taken
Strength from my body and robbed my soul of light,

Because this blind porangi gets his light
From Hiruharama. The darkness never ends
In Pharaoh’s kingdom. God, since you have taken
Man’s flesh, grant me a hut in the Maori paddock
To end my life in, with their kindness as my bridge,
Those friends who took me in from the road

Long ago. Their tears are the road of light
I need to bridge your darkness when the world ends.
To the paddock of Te Whiti let this man be taken.

In the dream I am lost in a Maori graveyard
Among the dunes of sand,
And like a wave of black water
The makutu hits me. No terror like this,
Latrines, ovens, graves, a woman’s anger
Splitting my skull with a stone axe,

Yet it is Te Whiro who wields the axe
Or else te taipo, the masters of the boneyard
Where I have to walk. Why should the Maori anger
Rise from the roots of the grass and the sand
To choke the soul of this
Old pakeha? To drown in deep water

Is the fate of those who go into the water
Of the marae. I know why the axe
Is raised above my skull. I know why this
Dream comes out of Te Whiro’s yard
To flatten a house built on sand
With the storm of an old anger,

And I accept the anger
As drowning men open their lungs to the water
Because the battle among the dunes of sand
Is won by losing it. I know the axe
Of the makutu was made in a yard
Where warriors drank black water before this

For their mother the land. The towns built over this
Black bog of a people’s anger,
Sweet-shop, jail and railway yard,
Will fall like leaves into the water
When willows are chopped by the farmer’s axe.
Blood swallowed by the sand

Rises again out of the sand.
On an old pakeha’s head let this
Makutu break its axe,
Since anger breeds anger.
The one who walked the water
Has no voice in Te Whiro’s yard

Except that the yard’s dark sand
Should drink down like water this
Old man’s blood, and aroha, not anger, blunt the axe.

Swept clean of leaves, with stripped boughs, the garden
Lifts black arms to the wan sky of winter,
Mater Dolorosa: the orchid house
Shuttered, and no birds by the pond’s clear glass
Where the boy and dolphin stand, to summer constant
Rapt yet in the daze of an archaic dream.

Here was my hope planted, the virgin dream
Of evergreen amazement, a snakeless garden.
By my own fault, to true love unconstant
I chart now an iron graph of winter;
Or, Hans Andersen’s mermaid, walk on glass,
On thorns, hot ploughshares, through a charnel house.

But you, stranger, in my body’s house
Sheltered, dreaming your deepwater dream,
Who make my shape strange in a looking-glass:
You, curled in the dusk of the first garden,
Forgive me if I call your weight a winter,
Castaway, to an older sun constant.

The flesh may be infirm, the spirit constant,
Though none know this in parlour or priest’s house.
You, conceived in icy absence, winter
Of sight, sound, touch, are substance of that dream
I dreamt when first I walked an autumn garden
And foresaw lasting joy in a lying glass.

Were he love’s kind, to see without a glass,
He would be constant yet to me inconstant,
Forgive as one did in Gethsemane’s garden;
But here are shapes lewd in a haunted house
I am alone, locked in the glacial dream
Of those who wake and know the world’s winter.

Lie still, child of unfaith—soon comes Winter,
Though you fear nothing, in the womb’s dark glass
Withheld: storm, tremor, cannot shake your dream;
Nor shall drug shatter. To your own law constant,
Fly whorled in amber, sleep—to a warring house
You will wake soon, and an unfruitful garden.

—I had not thought, garden, that I would winter
In the ill planet’s house. Prediction’s glass
Is flawed by our inconstant waking dream.

Now as the nights lengthen and the placid season
Ages to decay, we can hear, my love
(Waiting with window flowers, a wood fire flaring across
The small safe room) — we can hear the rawhead
Elegies of winter in the wind striding perilous
From antarctic, ravening where our days lie tangled.

Against that ice colossus I recall now the tangled
Wild bush at Silverstream in the picnic season.
You bathed there laughing, where deep and perilous
Under clay banks the creek ran. With sharpened love
I saw the child swell under your dress: the fountainhead
Of our content was plain, Time’s enmity no cross.

And under the bridge shaken where lorries cross
And stones are flood-scum white with briars tangled
Among them—kids had scrawled an ogre’s head
And crooked thigh, graffiti of a season
More innocent than ours, whose adult love
Walks in the night, naked and perilous.

Like Bors we come to the Chapel Perilous
Torn arches, sunken tomb and ruined cross.
This is where our too-long-buried love
Festering waits renewal. Against night’s terror tangled
No charm avails; here in a dry season
A generation stands, cloud thundering overhead.

For symbol take the Maori coffinhead
Seen under glass, proclaiming perilous
The grief and horror of an older season
Purged perhaps long since by the mission cross;
Yet big with death, emerges from the tangled
Archaic night, dwarfing our human love.

So too in the small death of parting, love,
When the ferry stirred gigantic, turning her head
Seaward. My heart, my very breath entangled
With yours, drawn out to fragile perilous
Threads of longing stretching across
The darkened Strait and the autumnal season.

May Time season our too wincing love
With the humour of the Cross, sparing your fortunate head
And in a perilous age our skein of peace untangled.