Reflection on 'Sky Rivers'

Jazz and I first met at Brisbane Writers' Festival 2022 and again a year later at Auckland Writers' Festival 2023 - where we sat next to each other over a meal, laughing at jokes I don’t remember now, with a beautiful gathering of queer indigenous writers. That night sparkled and crackled with colour and joy, and I remember noticing that Jazz has just the same smiling grace in person as her words do in her book How to Weave a Basket (but of course!).

We met across a time of upheaval - we had both recently moved house, and were both pondering how to make a home. In the background, in Aotearoa a summer of disastrous storms was just receding. We didn’t know then what further heartbreak and devastations this year would bring - almost swallowing us whole as we were trying to conclude our poem.

Then, on Zoom (ngā mihi ki a koe e Ani Te Whiu!), we spoke of our deeper homes. Of our sadness at not growing up on our homelands, and of our journeys back there. We shared about our brothers and our fathers. We discovered we are both freshwater women of inland peoples. We both love clay and earth.

And we started a google doc, and I threw words on it with alarming frequency. Fragmentary missives I kept tossing, unsure which might land. Until one day, Jazz scooped up handfuls of these fragments and wrote back to them in one fell, answering swoop. Or so it felt. And suddenly - there was a poem. A poem wrought through the miracle of sharing and responding - of conversation. How astounding. How simple poetry can be. Just release it.

We were writing our final stanzas when my phone's pared-back Google Docs took our words and scrambled them. It mashed our two parallel threads into one mingled and braided trickle to fit the narrow phone screen. An insistent call from beyond to let our words and our precious touchstones of home fold together and do their own creating now. So we did - and they did. Our ancestors know best!

I love these sky rivers they have shown us, and the feeling that we can ride our rivers towards a vast indigenous family though oceans keep us apart. Ani Te Whiu you are incredible, thank you for your vision. Jazz, what a joy it’s been to weave and ride and paddle and fly with you. May all these rivers and all these seas keep us all connected, loved, resistant and full hearted, always.