Camp out in foreign landscapes, inside of yourself.

Shake loose the withheld keening until your crow’s feet
bleed dry, for this night choir will palpate the stars
in coloured incarnations.

Reject the ornithologist’s bible; you already know
the flocks gathering on hilltops — on land
that will remain long after you’ve gone.

Swathes of birds will always retreat, towards trees
that hold your heart strings.

Autumnal leaves hail on forest floors in warm
nor’ westerly winds; coalesce in this elemental
release, because nature has no purposeful duality.

Face outward to go in — return to a body
that craves sunshine in its bones,
when death has recharted the map of you.

Fears are frost-tender fragments; remember
to place your hands gently in the soil.

Sit in a corner tight, comforted by the triangulation;
then widen yourself — sway your danse macabre,
to confront this ever-present mortality.

Collapse in fields devoid of people, where blackberries
will stain your fingers; for this absence
is a nebula of enormous proportions.

Hear these tender confessions, and yield yourself to grief.

I watch everyone getting older, but you.

How many mothers’ bodies are buried outside
churchyards, for choosing to lie down with
their children? They knew how quickly skies
could morph from blue to black;
in liquid despair, the power of their pain
sucked the air from the cosmos.

My mother dreams of a house covered in vines,
while I feel its bones; leached and breaking.

I understand the desire to follow, when infinity
pools of tears flood my hollowed hands,
and each time unprovoked, breath is excised
from my chest. Watching, as other people
control grief in public places;
when they rarely do that with laughter.

Misunderstanding this profound absence at the table;
we look to one another for answers.

Whenever the tide drags out, I sift through the mudflats,
searching for fragments of you;
in spectral compensation.

                                                                                                Light and dark rā versus pō
                                                                   the shadows that creased your face were held
                                                                                                then released.

                     Columns reach skyward, and punga stones rest beneath cubic facades
       with sharpened edges. Deconstructed beneath the night sky, I am unable to
hear your voice in concentric circles, that echo and repeat like rings of fire—
there is only this ever-present black.

The injustice of it                    and stark lines 
where others lie in their moulded condolences,
amidst rubble piles of revulsion.  

Unfathomable pain points me towards the absurdity of your enforced death.
And I count days, weeks, moons, when all that remains is a red mourning light.
Tangi te mapu, I am drawn in and out, until the ground swells where I stand,
in cruciform protest, inside this ever-present black.

Kākāriki returns me to your smile
                   kōwhai your voice                       whero your aroha
like a melody of encircled halos — around your infinite absence.

Ancient histories without human voices, where I listen solely to the manu
and the lack of anyone’s authority. It is there I lean inwards, in triangulated
opposition to the storm-clouded ether. Now, I hear you say, look up Mā,
for soon a comet will streak across this ever-present black.

your mark remains imprinted
unlike my earthen pigmentation
and the impermanence of clay

this whenua echoes in the sea—sky—light
and kanohi manifest in the kōhatu
~ innumerable totems, of you

are the leftovers on the beach all that awaits me
now that you are gone
between pebble-cast-sand and the tide

wave forms and spume couplets coat my stripped-back limbs
in gleaming quartz-like destruction
~ wrought, like tohorā bones from the deep

in shifting landscapes and underwater spaces
taniwha, fresh and salted, flex disembodied muscles
and I am wai—mate

ancient runes and DNA threads lie cloaked and frayed upon my shoulders
but those tohorā bones will rise again
~ agile, weightless and free

1. These forgotten paths lead nowhere obvious, but invisible creatures scurry and make their kōanga nests.
2. Later, I walk on pavements between parliament beehives and insurance company skyscrapers, with everyone suited up in masks and avoidant gazes, and hipsters with seven-eight-length trousers pressed just right.
3. I watch the flap of a manu wing in the breeze; the remainder lies squashed on the bitumen. I sit still, inside the tornado that swirls around me amidst the noise, avoiding the elephant in the room – my son’s death. It’s as though I’m in another dimension, which I suppose in many ways I am.
4. Sometimes I feel like I’m about five, when the mamae hits. It’s like when you’re a kid and you don’t understand what it was you did wrong, you’ve been told off and it hurts, but none of it makes any sense. It feels like it was yesterday that you died – not thirteen months later.
5. Armour turns your whole body into a patu, and I ask myself does being a crone mean that my only child had to die? How often do I compensate for others when they are faced with my grief? What the hell do people mean, when they say you’re looking really good?
6. Outkast’s Hey Ya, playing on the cafe stereo, reminders of you everywhere, your joy with music and how you always memorised the lyrics.
7. I never had a daughter, but I had a son and the mārama shone out of him from the moment he was conceived. Now he’s gone, in the space of a heartbeat, and his light can only shine through those dimensions accessible, when I’m fast asleep.