Category: School Competition 2022

Te Māori disciples of the rapture

I have feared ihu karaiti since I have learnt of the rapture
when te kore will make its journey back home
Ranginui will make its way to papatuanuku
And Māori will join the celestial
in this time
heavens trumpets will unearth oral korero
our body’s turning to vessels of the past
rising as unmoved time capsules
in the presence of weeping wahine o te atea
we are all weeping
as waka sink through quills of Biblical text,
gods disciples wade through awa
Tangaroa becoming familiar with foreign vessels
Sovereignty slowly losing its meaning through blistered history
papatuanuku weeps through confiscation of tapu land
our tupuna weep at the loss of mana to colonial constructs
For those who foresee the future, this is an ode
To the Maori disciples who have fought for te ao Marama
3 wise men will wake out of te paepera tapu

one will bring taonga
one will bring harakeke
The last brings the kereru

these gifts are given in the womb of Māori wahine
Birthing gifts of whakapapa
Back to the findings of Kupe
where our bodies will rest
Aotearoa
unearthed
in the between – te po

Ivy Lyden-Hancy
Papakura High School

From the author:

Kiaora Ko Ivy toku ingoa, this poem is about my overwhelming love for being a Māori wahine in modern day New Zealand. It conveys how colonialism affected our country, under the influence of Christianity. I utilised the 3 concepts of te kore,te po and te ao marama to bring these concepts to life. Being Māori is my passion and it drives me every day to do better and succeed. Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Scribbler

Words
make my heart pitch, tip from its ledge,
warm meals of
paper and ink and plastic dustcovers.
We’ll be lifelong friends, swear it.
Without you I am muted,
feelings decay in my throat’s
dark chute.
Try to weave words, drop stitches,
turn the chalky silence of pages
to life.
I write until streetlights blink on,
shape you to dispel shadow, let in the sunlight
regurgitate
sadness and beauty.
Friends of ink and paper,
when the story trips, cuts open
its knees
and the words I fill you with
die out,
you leave.
Writing suffuses my mind with life’s
tackle,
drips from me, open wounded.
I’ll knit a daisy chain of letters, breathe clearer.
You are timorous soldiers,
dislocated from your homes and
herded away in emails,
disfigured by rejection and glory.
I crank the dials, try to brew
magic, medicine,
till fingertips ache, go numb.
I neglect the world for the misshapen
scraps of ideas,
the inklings which leak from
my head’s crevasses.
Vowel sounds and
grammatical placeholders,
embryonic and
delicate as snapped twigs.
To breach physical definitions,
my pen is never unpoised.
The writer in me

never turns off her light,
nor lays her head on the desk.

Isabelle Lloydd
St Mary’s College, Auckland

From the author:

The poem “Scribbler” examines my relationship to writing and to language itself. It seeks to articulate the emotional bond between writer and fruit, and the fixating pull of this expressive form. The poem’s name suggests the idea that my writing is always unfinished, imperfect, for constantly I learn and change.

Born into this World

Born into this world,
Where lines segregated land
Somehow, among these lines,
I lost my place in this world,
My home was cut into two –
Half in aotearoa,
Half in China.
Chinese words used to be the cushion I fall back on
When English became too much.
But the longer I spent in Aotearoa,
Chinese morphed from a comfortable pillow,
To a foreign, dusty object sitting on a shelf,
Rusting away with time.
I had not realise that English had become my cushion
Until my first reflex to answering my parents
Was a “what” in english.
Walking around the house in barefoot,
Speaking English to my sister,
Choosing to eat at cafes instead of Chinese restaurants,
My own culture is slipping away from me with time…
… almost…
Except when my culture unravels
away from me into strings,
It never really unties entirely,
Because my parents ingrained
And tied the complicity of the Chinese culture
into my identity like a Chinese knot,
Tight but unbreakable.
My mum’s homely Chinese cooking every night
On the table after I come home from school,
That fragrance that takes me back to China,
And my dad calls in Cantonese “sek fan la”.
“Dinner’s ready”.

Erica Hu
Diocesan School for Girls