Project: Transit of Venus
Hinemoana Baker - The fifteen paces between my socks and my shoes
Hinemoana Baker - The fifteen paces between my socks and my shoes
1.
The hotel room is a yawning
cavern and I have forgotten my
carabiners. The bed’s made
tight, the linen’s cool, the overblanket
smells of soap and someone’s
breath. You’re in Ruapehu Street
between the ill-fitting
fitted winter sheets now bald
of any fleece. Yellow makes you scratch.
A planet is getting ready for its big moment.
2.
These two boys have to jump a little
to see into this telescope.
You can’t look directly at it, man.
Ka wreck koe i tō eyesight.
The transiteers, the singing politicians,
the old light of the new
nation. All of us stroll
along the revamped wharf
pitching our wishes
at the glinting Pacific.
And she’s there too,
the one they call Holden Torana
or Skinny Banana, Madame Iguana.
She’ll be long dead when they bring up the time
capsule. She’ll leave her responsiblities
purring in their red
blankets. We will monitor
the spectrum of scattered
sunlight on her surface.
She will say, in her way:
parachutes are heritage seeds
parachutes are significant star systems
parachutes are priestesses dancing and dying
3.
I wasn’t here for Nukutaimemeha
therefore this is not the real globe.
The girl with the grass-green ring
was not here for Horouta and neither was
the Ginger Bee, nor the sailor singing his insistent songs
of icebirds and liquor. All things move South
when they become cold. All things move North
when they become cold. All things make sails
from the liquid ocean, from their lala language.
4.
In eight minutes your light
will reach me, hangi smoke in my mouth.
The light which fell on my newborn body is still alive.
I plant a tree at the mouth of the Uawa river
in your name my crawling, bawling space station.
It is imperative I be as far away from you as possible.
You rise from the yellow bed, black and cold
and travel four hours
every cent of you making war
the telescopes of the world trained upon you.
_____________
Notes by the poet:
The following phrases/words reference and/or quote poems by the three German poets who partnered with us in the Transit of Venue project:
- every cent of you making war, (originally 'every cent of them / making war'), space station and Ginger Bee – Brigitte Oleschinski, tr. Andrew Shields, from 'Geisterströmung', Gedichte mit CD, DuMont, 2004
- grass-green ring – Ulrike Almut-Sandig, tr. Bradley Schmidt, from 'Thicket' (original title: 'Dickicht', Schoffling & Co., 2011)
- insistent songs and icebirds – Uwe Kolbe, Sailor's All', from 'Sailor's Home' (poems of love and drunkenness), tr. Mick Standen and Jo Tudor, from 'Sailor's Home' (anthology), Yang Lian (ed.), Shearsman Books Ltd, 2007
- the word transiteers was used by Toby Manhire in a blog written for the NZ Listener about the Transit of Venus event.
- The newborn body/light phrase in section 4, verse 1, is from a podcast I listen to called ‘The Mental Illness Happy Hour’. A listener called Anne wrote in from Berlin about her atheism, and how her wonder at the natural world, physics and biology is no less intense simply because she doesn’t believe in a deity of any kind.
The link to her full response is here: http://mentalpod.com/Anne-Atheism