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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.’

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