Selina tusitala marsh
Entering Pouliuli
Gender is too shallow
a pool
for our gods
to dip a toe
or lick their shimmering
visage, but I've always thought
Pouliuli to have
more male
than female
energies, and I know
he’s not strictly
a god, like
you’ve never heard
the one about how
Pouliuli ensnared Rā, the sun,
or crushed the trickster one, Māui,
between his toothed walls
but as you and I
contemplate entering
Pouliuli, I see us
male and female Māuis
crawling into death
seeking truths of root
mysteries, cut in half by
pīwakawaka’s laugh
and history begins.
And us? Babe, we keep
freefalling in all of it.
love in the time of covid-19
As the last plane is grounded
the last border closed
the last bag of rice
whipped away
from supermarket
shelves
you send me Seneca
he feeds me what we have:
we want
for nothing.
Our ala
still beneath surface
a bare trace
till infected
by belly embrace
mutating with each contact
till pandemic.
We start
with one request
one grain of rice
placed on the first
chessboard square
to be doubled on the next
till by the last square
18 quintillion grains
are owed. Seduced
by exponential love
bigger than you
or me
or COVID-19.
pomegranate
Like Persephone
You offered me
Seeds from the underworld
Coiled, oiled serpent
Lord of Pouliuli
I scooped
Its rosebud flesh
Licking its sluiced juice
From my bloody fingertips
Bound to you
For every season
Ever after, Lover
vigil
Place me on your shrine
I am the hijab, the ta’ovala, the ula fala
Feeding every mouth
but mine
I promise intimacy
where there is none
where one person
is a net
working below the surface
of a nation’s forgetting
social mirror on the wall
tell nothing, tell all
tell nothing, tell nothing
Selina Tusitala Marsh (ONZM, FRSNZ) is the former New Zealand Poet Laureate and acclaimed performer and author. In 2019 she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to poetry, literature and the Pacific community. Earlier this year Selina was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. An Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Auckland, Selina teaches Creative Writing and Pacific Literature. Her area of research focuses on hearing silenced or marginalised indigenous poetic voices. She has performed poetry for primary schoolers and presidents (Obama), queers and Queens (HRH Elizabeth II). She has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Fast Talking PI (2009), Dark Sparring (2013), Tightrope (2017) and a graphic memoir, Mophead (2019), shortlisted for the 2020 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
Selina notes: ‘Ala is the proto-Polynesian word for path, and Pouliuli is a Samoan concept of metaphysical darkness, as well as the title of Albert Wendt's 1979 novel.’