Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Looking up a word in another language is often a doorway into the past of its speakers. When I did a search for the Maori word for “warrior,” the answers were far more than just words:

ika a Whiro – veteran warrior

• ika – aquatic creature, slain warrior, prized possession

kaitoa – brave man, warrior

• toa – to win, courage, warrior
• tore kai huruhuru – young warrior kairākau or kai rākau – band of warriors

māia – bold, capable, confident, endurance, warrior

mumu – valiant warrior, boisterous wind

ngārahu – sooty black, charcoal, black pigment, commander, military leader, war dance: a haka in which the men are armed, jumping and stomping. A war party performs before battle, in front of elders and experienced warriors who judged by their performance whether they were ready to go into battle. Also called tūtū ngārehu, tūtū waewae and whakatū waewae.tētēkura – canoe figurehead – frond or shoot of a fern or plant, Prince of Wales Feathers, crape fern, Leptopteris superb, a native tufted ground fern – brave warrior, leader or chief

Within tribal and clan systems, wars are usually local and short-term. When a society in which warfare has become long term between whole nations expands into tribal territory, the result is almost always a loss for the tribes. But the warrior remains an archetype of tribal legend.

Hone Wiremu Heke Pokai was a highly influential 19th century chief of the Ngāpuhi tribe, and he was the leader of a Māori rebellion over treaty violations and economic hardship.

Hone Tuwhare (1922–2008) was given the same name as this Maori warrior, a leader of one of the tribes that is part of Tuware’s heritage. Tuwhare became an outspoken activist for trade unionism, civil rights, the environment, and against nuclear weapons, and New Zealand’s preeminent Maori poet.

At fifteen Tuwhare was apprenticed as a New Zealand Railways boilermaker. He became a qualified boilermaker and a member of the trade union movement, and passionate about human rights. He was an organizer of the first Maori Writers and Artists hui (assembly) and walked in the Maori Land March in 1975.

His later years brought awards and recognition, and his memory is now highly honored in New Zealand, but during his turbulent life, he was sometimes in hot water with the New Zealand government. In 1957, the Minister of Maori Affairs even censored one of his early poems because Tuwhare was a card-carrying Communist.

But in 1999, Hone Tuware was named New Zealand’s second Te Mata Poet Laureate. Administered by the National Library of New Zealand and funded by the New Zealand Government, the Poet Laureate is selected biennially and receives an award of $50,000 per year. At the end of his two year term, he published Piggy-Back Moon (2001)

Tuware’s poems cover everything from his fascination with water in all its forms, to Martin Luther King and the Vietnam war, South African apartheid, and the most sensual of love poetry.

The success of Tuwhare’s first published collection of poems, No Ordinary Sun, changed his life. Then he changed the lives of many others.

The title poem is a powerful warning about the dangers of the Nuclear Age.

NO ORDINARY SUN

Tree let your arms fall:
raise them not sharply in supplication
to the bright enhaloed cloud.
Let your arms lack toughness and
resiliance for this is no mere axe
to blunt nor fire to smother.

Your sap shall not rise again
to the moons pull.
No more incline a deferential head
to the wind’s talk, or stir
to the tickle of coursing rain.

Your former shaginess shall not be
wreathed with the delightful flight
of birds nor shield
nor cool the adour of unheeding
lovers from the monstrous sun.

Tree let your naked arms fall
nor extend vain entreaties to the radiant ball.
This is no gallant monsoon’s flash,
no dashing trade wind’s blast.
The fading green of your magic
emanations shall not make pure again
these polluted skies . . . for this
is no ordinary sun.

O tree
in the shadowless mountains
the white plains and
the drab sea floor
your end at last is written

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