Poem 334
This came towards the end of White Cloud and was interspersed with both excerpts from Tim’s mother’s journal account of her life and with Tim’s song Clarity Begins At Home … it’s the last piece of my writing from the show that I’ll include here … what I tried to do with most of the spoken word sections was to create a kind of informal open-weave language with an easy semi-conversational rhythm, room for banter and jokes but also reaching for something deeper, able to contain all the tones, poetry with a small ‘p’ … this was written as I prepared to come home from France after ten months away from New Zealand, the longest time I’d ever spent outside our boundaries … the idea was to gain some perspective on the push and pull of pakeha culture and gather the strands of the White Cloud themes together, what binds us (if anything), what allows us to speak of ‘us’ … the last lines are intended to evoke that moment when stuffed with adventure and broadened horizons you step onto the Air NZ Airbus in a foreign country and are greeted by a New Zealand voice …
( the list of names contains three from the next two generations of my own family … the twitching spine of these lizard islands echoes Poem 62 written two decades previously … )
My Tribe
My tribe comes from all over
my tribe has
English names
Irish Scots and Welsh
French and Dutch names
and new names strange
on the tongue
my tribe is made up of Kaylas Shaylas
Talias Taylas
Jadens Bradens
Rorys and Hunters
my tribe comes of chilly muscle and sweaty willpower
it weathers the cold and the shocks of the twitching spine
of these lizard islands
my tribe tells good jokes on itself
we were raised to think we're better than no one
and no one is better than us
it’s our strength
our blindness
our thick skin our curse
and our blessing
my tribe doesn’t know its history
because it believes in living
in the moment
and is afraid
of what it might find
my tribe fears it’s not a tribe at all
but a sort of loose-knit circle
of work friends
my tribe tends not to know its good luck
is erudite on the rules of the ruck
rampantly overuses the word fuck
but basically thinks this place
doesn’t suck
too much
it was not always
safe here
it still isn’t
in the crush of nations we’re often overlooked
but there are legends of us
a lost tribe at the bottom of the atlas
a sea people
who sailed away
we’re not lost
we’re moving
in the crowds of the world
looking at everything with that frank curiosity
looking like everyone else
until we open our mouth
what is that accent?
we have never been militarily invaded
we have been invaded
by every other means
but sometimes
it’s the principle that counts
my tribe
sets a lot of store by principles
that was pretty much all we had
to kick off with
but kick off we did
and run the length of the field
and the field in this case is a thousand kilometre one
twisted over a rim of fire
and it sees the sun early
in the day of the world
and my tribe looks
and gets on with its business
many decisions to make
and rows to hoe
and though I fly back to you
to lie not side by side
in our meeting-house
but eave by eave in our sleeping houses
still I find
myself at the heart of something
that can’t be described or defined
in a spark
of a smile between two of my kind
I subscribe one more time
to the tribe
that is mine