The last bird poem

Ever since I wrote the first bird poem

I have been swearing to the gods of colonisation

I will not write another one.

Sparrows, starlings, pigeons, geese

Trafalgar Square everywhere you look

but  Ruru landed outside my window last night.

You’re a difficult one she said

I’m glad we’ve finally got your attention.

When you wake up in the morning and your bedroom is full of birds

you are either going to die or write another poem about birds.

The next morning there was a rapist in my room

Sir Walter Buller (1838 – 1906, I’ve written about his kind before

you’ll know his name from the butter or the river or the book about birds).

He bent down over me and whispered

The Maori “are dying out and nothing can save them.

Our plain duty as good compassionate colonists, 

is to smooth down their dying pillow”.

Stuff the pillow with feathers of birds, he said.

Catch them, kill them, stuff them, sell them

send them back to the motherland.

Extinct them, extinct them all, it drives the prices up.

When the huia were all gone

Maori had survived the genocide.

They walked over slivers of land

and called out in the voices of huia

We remember you, O, rangatira.

Ka maumahara mātou ki a koe, e rangatira.

*Ruru: native owl

*Quote from Te Ara, Nga Tangata Taumata Rau Dictionary of New Zealand Biography teara.govt.nz

*Huia: extinct native bird

*Rangatira: person of high standing