Reflection on 'Sky Rivers'

As the Fair Trade anthology title ‘Woven’ implies, working on this collaborative piece with Cassandra felt like a single gesture being passing back and forth across the seas that separate us. Cass and I were in the wonderful situation of having met in Meanjin at the Brisbane Writers Festival in 2022 and again in May 2023 at the Auckland Writers Festival in Tāmaki, after our Fair Trade collaboration had begun. I was already a huge fan of Cass’s book How | Hao and trusted that we had been paired together with some ancestral match-making. Our conversations were of shared experiences, of families and homes and rivers, yet distinct within our different contexts. Our similarities took the shape of a greater Indigenous kin system, a great net cast across this corner of the ocean, one knotted with shared struggles, shared triumphs, shared needs. The poem we created is very much interlaced with our passing back and forwards of words and knowings. I’m so grateful to Cass who so elegantly began the text, starting where I struggled, creating the beginning from which everything else flowed. Guided by Anne-Marie Te Whiu the process of being a part of Fair Trade felt like being welcomed into a wider family of First Nations poets working across the globe. I feel so lucky to have been able to work with Cassandra in this way, to have grown my poetry family, and to have created this piece together. Fair Trade is the sort of project that keeps me in love with poetry and the communities that form around it.