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Hinemoana Baker

New Zealand

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cast down - mephisto jones

Hinemoana Baker is a poet, editor, musician and producer currently living in Brisbane as 2009 Arts Queensland Poet in Residence. She began as a playwright for Taki Rua, New Zealand’s first indigenous theatre collective. Hinemoana’s writings have featured in many anthologies, including Best New Zealand Poems, SPORT and Landfall. Her first poetry collection, ‘mātuhi | needle’(2004), was co-published in New Zealand and in the United States. Her new collection is due out in early 2010. Her poetry, (‘…like my relations’, she says) is a mix of Māori and European influences, coupled with an abiding passion for sound and sonic art.

Dismantling the Crane

What is silver? Into this finger-space

the kotuku appears, flying once only

and far – to Holland, the vacated

apartment of your quiet friends

beaded slippers for sale

behind the silhouette

of the Moroccan woman whose feet

have been hurting her all day.

What is lost, here, where there was not

even eye contact, not even

eyes? Here a woman floated half-

miserable above land clutching

a posy – now there are growing

flowers, red with fat, sappy

green stalks and spongy leaves

and beside them the neighbourly

buttercups. Silver has become

hammer and aluminium. The star

in her firmament makes her way

over Rarotonga murmuring

hoki mai, hoki mai...

Meanwhile, how can this tui

be so violently black? White

petals could be made of

icing sugar, he flutters his wattle

with his two voice boxes. I sit here

wearing my bottletop, my lips, the dome

above me dewy with condensation. Outside

men in orange vests prepare

to dismantle the crane

its four ropes of chain rise

like snakes from the bed

of a dusty truck, link after link

on and on, until the morning

is over.

Sugar

(a confection for two voices)

sugar

why is it that sugar        once upon a time

doesn’t taste the way she used toI could take it all day

it’s as if i’m shutting down    and all night, i’m serious

i’m serious

or parts of me are shutting downthere was no problem

there should be no problem

there shouldn’t be anything shutting down

nothing should be dying like that

not at this age

but it doesn’t agree with me it was all about excess

the tiny, pitted, porousfree will and appetites

surfaces of my very tongue  looking at me like that all day

i want to address myself        from the surface, from the

like a letter to sugar       smooth table top

sugar oh sugar

you don’t agree with me

you never agree with me

any more

FOOTNOTE:

'Sugar' uses the two-voices device and page layout of US poet emily xyz. She performs her poems with her long time stage partner Myers Bartlett, and has published them in 'the emily xyz songbook' (Rattapallax Press, New York, 2004). Basically, the left column is said by one voice, the right by the other, each line different text but said at the same time. The centre column (in bold) indicates both voices speaking the same words at the same time. Go on, give it a go.