It’s 2024, October 16. The Guardian reports a state-of-the-art fire station in western Germany that was completed last year at a cost of tens of millions of euros has burned to the ground because it had not been equipped with a fire alarm.
In recent dreams I’m holding a koala. I’m holding or hunting for a koala or my father. Reversing a huge car into a tiny park or my ex. By the time we arrive the kitchen is closed but we eat the owner.
For Hind alone we should all burn. For Hind Rajab, aged six. The chief and his thousand descendants say I die, I die, I live, I live. Some translate it as a question, some with a we: will we die? Or will we live? Is this the paramedics come to save us? Is this our beloved’s celestial body, shining again?
workshop
Open the door
with a twist and a kick
there’s no other way.
The ship’s bell hanging
from the inside handle
clangs like a...well.
Like a burglar alarm.
The smell of hot rubber
old seawater, dog blankets.
His rusty vice, regulators
in pieces. On the sticky
shelf, that first book
vague with dust and
spiders’ webs. Don’t
whatever you do
in this shed
be yourself, listening.
Time is not the same
as value. View it all
from the perspective of
the wall-clock with its
shouting tick, its bad batteries
its chuckling, emphatic tock.
medicinal
Dad went through a phase of putting honey on everyone. Manuka honey: medicinal. There was a honey centre half an hour away at Paengaroa. His fingers were thick and rough, huge-knuckled. He could hardly fit them in the jar. He dragged a good ounce out and onto my girlfriend’s eczema. Innumerable short-lived applications on the dog’s paw-pads. Kina spikes in his hands got a slap of it and maybe a plaster.
On my toast right now, the last of my 40+ Multifloral MGO, tested, certified raw, methylglyoxyl derived from dihydroxyacetone, the levels of which are validated by independent labs in New Zealand and trusted from hive to home. I’ve almost finished the whole tub, Dad, and it’s not helping. It’s not helping.
Hinemoana Baker is a poet, writer and musician from Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Ngāi Tahu, English and German stock. Hinemoana has travelled and performed extensively as a writer and musician in the last 25 years, both nationally and internationally. As well as publishing four poetry collections, editing many more and producing five albums of her original music and poetry, Hinemoana has delighted many audiences with her solo stage shows, which pivot around sonic art, lyric poetry and family storytelling. Her latest collection of poetry, Funkhaus (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2021), was shortlisted in 2021 for the Ockham Awards. This book was released in translation through the Azur imprint of German publisher Voland & Quist in 2023 and has since also been published in Polish, and launched at the Czesław Miłosz festival 2024 in Kraków. Hinemoana returned from Berlin 2024 to take up the Randell Cottage writers residency in Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara Wellington, where she worked on her current collection, Exhaust World. These poems are from that manuscript.