A poem a day: Dear Tūpuna 3
Author:
Jessica Hinerangi
Publisher:
Auckland University Press
ISBN:
9781869409913
Date Published:
13 July 2023
Pages:
76
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$29.99
Aotearoa celebrates Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day on Friday when poetry will pop up in churches, bookshops, libraries and out on the streets through music, poets sharing an open mic, book launches, poetry walks and more. Here at Kete, we’ve started early with a poem each day this week. Dear Tūpuna 3 is from Āria, the first poetry collection from Jessica Hinerangi. She is a poet, journalist and illustrator, working primarily on Instagram under the name @maori_mermaid.
Dear Tūpuna 3
I’m back to where I need to be.
My sister and I crouch in the front yard with a dead kawau pū manu between our legs, plucking the grey and black feathers from squishy flesh. We are practising making earrings and decorating our kete with the gifts from Tāne and Tangaroa. We trade what we’ve learned on the road and in our tutorials, this knowledge seeps into the grass at our feet like the juices of this manu. The garden will be especially fruitful this year.
It took me a while to find my feet. I had to go all the way back to where our waka landed to learn that I never actually had to physically go there to get closer to you. ‘Chill out, kōtiro,’ you whisper through my sleep, ‘let go. It’s not your job to hold up the sky.’ I can’t believe I actually thought for a second that you didn’t have all the time in the world for me.
The self-doubt won’t ever leave. There will always be someone at the back of the room spitting about what we look like, how we act. There will always be someone telling us we are asking for too much. Be grateful, catch up, times have changed.
I was fed so many empty words that lived in my puku like kutu, gnawing away at my internal lining, making space for more empty words. Now that I’ve stopped listening, there are these gaps and bite marks, desperate to be filled with rongoā.
So I drink kawakawa tea every few months and make balms with the recipe taught to me at the wānanga. I escort my colonial self back up the way we came, carefully unbuttoning the pearls on our blouses, shimmying the petticoats to our ankles, stripping the scales from our stockings. I turn over and glide my scissors down the back of our slimy corsets, then I check and scrub the corners of our naked wairua with warm water and kūmarahou. It’s not about being clean, it’s about being open. I let the ones with my best interests at heart in. You are with me all the way. My tail comes and goes.
I wake to feel you watching me, more and more of you, following me to the kitchen to pour hot water, to ready the coffee, standing at my side while I butter the toast, peering over my shoulder as I try to edit my poems. You choose the colours I draw with, guiding my pen along the page, out from you come these visions of moon maidens, eels, and mermaids.
These moments here and there I find in the middle of the day, this breath I am so lucky to have, my harrowing ribs rattling inside of me, they become still and secure when I think of you. This skin was made by you – the veins, the muscle, the branches of bones. I owe everything to you and yet, you ask for so little in return.
I will keep writing. Short letters now and then, asking impossible questions. I wonder what you would write back.
‘Girl,’ I hear it clearly now, ‘you have nothing to prove. But that doesn’t mean you don’t pick up the tea towel.’
‘Never stop giving,’ you tell me, ‘that’s how you get. If you’ve got a little more, give some. You’ve got extra legs, hand back a few, you only need two. Activate giving what you were blessed with to your cousins, because then everyone can eat. Activate listening from beneath your high horse instead of on top of it. Activate community conversation and save your sweet tears for bedtime. Dig your way into the core of the kōrero you hear, before taking some blind offence. Strive to be the wise pūngāwerewere we know you can be.’
So in between tasks, doing the dishes, brushing my hair, before starting a new book, tumbling through te reo classes, strapping on butterfly heels, drawing naked ladies, in the back of my mind I ask these pātai . . . What can I give today? What are my tūpuna trying to say?
When someone I love comes to me crying, I tell them to write.
Write to your tūpuna, and they will reply through you.
I am forever listening.
With love,
your mokopuna.
From Āria by Jessica Hinerangi (Auckland University Press, $29.99)
To read more about Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, see https://tinyurl.com/5n998vxm
To read a review of Āria, https://tinyurl.com/7rcdf8k7
