The Great Fish Maui Snared
With canoe and hook of a jawbone
below a great fish Maui snared,
and his brothers half-crazed behaving
leapt and gouged in frenzy craving.
From Palliser Bay to Cape Reinga
(departing place of the spirits),
from Egmont in the west to Mt Hikurangi
where dawn’s light is first to see
Home where the far north narrows
to the old thousand year Kauri,
when whalers from its tall trunks vast
made the finest spar and mast.
In those giant limbed canopied pillars
echo the sounds of the ages,
from coast to coast on great sandy reach
Doubtless Bay to Ninety Mile Beach
Hokianga to Kaipara to Waitemata
with coves and tawny sandhills,
where navigators of old voyaged erstwhile
Hauraki Gulf and Great Barrier Isle.
To yon trail where the mighty trio rise -
Ruapehu, Tongariro, Ngauruhoe,
with their deep crater lakes and icy snow
spew ash and rock on plains below
In rocky Coromandel Peninsula hills
once glittered nuggets of gold,
now all that glitters its coves and bends
is the sun off the Firth of Thames.
Land of the ancient Maori fortified pa
and colony pioneer settlements,
when village tribes gathered in bounty
food of the earth and sky and sea
Down the gorge rapids of Huka Falls
a maelstrom of turquoise green,
and beyond its wild white water waves
Waitomo’s dark and glowing caves.
A journey through its volcanic plateau
basalt and granite igneous rock,
wherein lies the great caldera so steep
in the heart of Taupo’s big deep
Beech forests whisked by desert winds,
wilderness and eeling swamps -
volcanic pumice flats that dormant lie
and molten fountains in the sky.
Willow trees, poplars, totara, pines
on Lake Waikaremoana’s shore.
Poverty Bay, where Captain Cook said
“there behold! Young Nick’s Head”
In Frying Pan’s Echo Lake cauldron,
Venus Baths, Champagne Pool.
Rotorua’s hot sulphurous breath await
in muddy springs at Hell’s Gate.
See hidden valleys and mountain mists
in its ring of fire, this shaky isle -
by smouldering cliffs at their sheerest
a thermal wonderland silica terrace
The moa hunters roamed this land
in the forest and on the plains -
now the tattooed warrior becomes so
like that flightless bird long ago.
From the depths of myth and legend
these spirits of its ancestors live -
where a morning sun has its sky reared
it wakes the great fish Maui snared
Written: May 1996
Copyright ©
Keith D Trestrail
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