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

The Truth the Dead Know

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959


Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

--Anne Sexton (1928-1974), American Confessional poet and professor who struggled with mental illness and childhood abuse. She took her life at age 46.