Tangaroa Nui

Last night I dreamed again of tides,
not those tides rocking soundlessly
in caves that shuffle old men off
in their extremity, but those inner
tides that have their source in dreams
where my father, astride the passage,
reins them in with outstretched hands …
I saw again the tides plunging
in harness, sea and sky boiling
together, and myself a child flipped
high into the air by a dolphin,
to float down softly as a feather
past my father’s smiling eyes, past
the wheeling seabirds, to settle
on the sand and fall fast asleep
with the tide beating in my ears
as surely as the heart of him
who checks the pulse and flow of things
and holds time in his hands.


-- Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1925-2009), New Zealand poet of Cook Islands and Pakeha ancestry

Tangaroa is the god of the sea.

Image: surf at Napier, Hawke Bay