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

Waking with Russell

Whatever the difference is, it all began

the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I’d rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

--Don Paterson (1963- ), Scottish poet, writer musician, and winner of the T. S. Eliot prize.

For a discussion of this poem, see here.

"Mezzo del Cammin" means middle aged and lacking direction.

On the Beach at Night

On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

--Walt Whitman (1819-1892), one of America's pre-eminent poets, printer, teacher, editor and clerk whose innovations and subject matter both shocked and influenced the writing scene of his lifetime to today.

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World

The morning air is all awash with angels—Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”



The eyes open to a blue telephone 
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel. 

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber, 
Proctologist, urologist, or priest? 

Who is blessed among us and most deserves 
The first call? I choose my father because 

He’s astounded by bathroom telephones. 
I dial home. My mother answers. 

“Hey, Ma,” I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” 
She gasps, And then I remember that my father 

Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,” 
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry— 

How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says. 
“I made him a cup of instant coffee 

This morning and left it on the table— 
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years— 

And I didn’t realize my mistake 
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs 

At the angels who wait for us to pause 
During the most ordinary of days 

And sing our praise to forgetfulness 
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings. 

Those angels burden and unbalance us. 
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback. 

Those angels, forever falling, snare us 
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

--Sherman Alexie (1966- ), member off the Spokane/Coeur d/Alene Nation, poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, filmmaker, from Face, 2006

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

—Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), Irish poet, Nobel laureate, teacher, and translator, from Death of a Naturalist, 1966.