New poetry by Thames writer Bob Orr.
Hawaiki
My first
university
the freezing works
at Horotiu –
my first professor
a tohunga
in white overalls and
gumboots
who worked
on the boning floor.
One evening drinking
beer
as the setting sun
was turning the Waikato River red
in the course
of our conversation
he told me
he could trace his
whakapapa
back to Hawaiki.
I enquired ‘where is
Hawaiki?’
His answer
I can’t recall.
On the other side
of the street
beneath the bloodlines
of an evening sky
a boy on a bike
chanted
Ake!
Ake!
Ake!
From the new collection One Hundred Poems and a Year by Bob Orr (Steele Roberts, $30), available at Unity Books.
Bob Orr
Bob Orr is the author of One Hundred Poems and a Year, published by Steele Roberts in December 2018. It is his ninth collection of poetry. He first came to attention as a featured poet in the seminal anthology The Young New Zealand Poets (1971). He has won the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, and was awarded the Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato in 2017. Bob was born in Hoe-O-Tainui in 1949.
