Ruby Hinepunui Solly

Onepū

I

You are building a castle in te kore
grain by grain
the sands before time
stack
themselves
in circles.
You are the iris
a turret builds itself
around you.
Sand pours through
to count the first minutes,
heats up to glass
with nothing to shatter it
  except sound.

At first there was only black
but like the black of the iris;
the black of a hole ripped in the whariki of space time,
with your invisible hands writing in the chaos
of what comes after birth.
Somewhere deep in your horizon
is a ships cargo turned to stone under story,
  turned to history under hands.

The mind is one hundred generations thick;
a spider’s web to space,
glowing train tracks to the future.
Old hands there feeling the ground
   for the rumble of machines.

There is no way to see what we look like here,
seeing has not yet been invented.
Inside it, you are writing yourself four walls.
You are writing yourself the ridge poles.
You are writing yourself a river
to wash off what no longer serves us
precious children of the South.
One hundred generations
of being more
than fully grown,
than fully formed
than fully carved
from blue glass melted
from the worlds first bank
            of melting sand.

II

At one of our pā,
where the boy was lifted to the air,
there is a tāua
not unlike you.
Each night she walks
the dirt roads.

She greets the boys
when they remove their caps,
tells them about the blood in the stone
totoweka, she says.
The blood is in it, not on it.

They all nod,
they are carving themselves intricacies
within the chiselled lines.
Their world spirals out from this centre.
These hei tiki are made when toki break.

I am the grindstone;
the peoples that carve leaders
by gardening, by loving, by washing the dead after battle.
It is through these tasks
that we build a pā
for us to leave
after it is ransacked.

My name is mentioned,
She connects me to you, e Tāua.
But you are old and we leave you alone,
as you wish and need.

But here in this whakapapa
I wear a bush shirt with my dress,
I wear my upper lip stiff,
I pack a pipe
and make a new star in the darkness.

I wear my skin like a costume
a white sheet embroidered
by chisel and gun.

III

I dream of drowning a lot.
Not always in water
but water feels best.
You wrote yourself a tower,
you wrote your darlings a river of milk to drown in.
I write myself a bottle
with a message to you
inside it.
I was told that pounamu
was another word for bottle.
I thought it was because what was inside was a taonga.
The warmth it brung, the flow back to te kore to fray our fibres.
But it was just that deep green that named it so;
like a fish caught in the light.

I enter into the blackness
holding this bottle, this pounamu.
I throw it into the sea you have become.
Its glass shatters into Poutini.
The great taniwha breaching
like he has the strength
of every toki we have used
to chip away at ourselves
until this ocean of time
was carved in reverse.

I run the water through my hands,
liquid made from a million grains of sand,
made of a million black letters.
I hold my breath,
open my eyes
and join you
within.

Ruby Solly (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu) is a writer, taonga pūoro practitioner, musician, and music therapist living in Pōneke on the old riwai plantation of her tīpuna. As a musician and taonga pūoro player she has performed with artists such as Trinity Roots, Yo-yo Ma, French for Rabbits and Whirimako Black. Her first book 'Tōku Pāpā' was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2021, and her second book 'The Artist' is due for publication in 2023. 'The Artist' looks at how pūrākau and whakapapa inform our stories, while taking the reader into the world of Te Wai Pounamu and the cave tohu that give it's people their maps and understandings of story and its power.