Api Taylor the Maori Poet

As a student participating in the English Scholarship pathway, I and many others were given the opportunity to listen to a poetry reading by Apirana Taylor. Apirana Taylor is a Maori poet who has travelled the world to tell his many tales, with his guitar, Aroha, and his flute to help him convey the voice of the poet.

For the first period, we were excused from our classes along with all the Maori classes and other years participating in the pathway so we could listen to his readings. He had many poems, about people and their stories, but one of my personal favourites was Hinemoa's Daughter.

This poem tells a story about the descendant of Hinemoa, the Maori princess. Hinemoa had been forbidden from marrying her love by her father, as he was a commoner. At night the love of Hinemoa, Tane, would play his flute on the island he lived on, which was surrounded by a lake. One night Hinemoa swam across the lake, guided
by the melody of Tane's flute. Once she had crossed the lake she married Tane.

Hinemoa's Daughter, however, is about her distant descendant, who is a fellow poet to Apirana, and after meeting her and her telling him who she was and her life's story, he wrote Hinemoa's Daughter. I personally love this because it isn't a happy story, it tells of the hardships and difficulties this girl faced.
After the first period and the rest of his poems and stories, those who were in the Scholarship Pathway were lucky enough to participate in a workshop with Apirana.

He asked us about how writing makes us strong, we all answered with different things, that writing gives you the chance to represent things that cannot be pronounced with words from the mouth, or that it gives you a question and challenges you to answer and wonder and question even more.
He then gave us a challenge, a word association game, if he could fill the whiteboard with the words we associated with it we would win a prize, otherwise, each of us would have to pay him ten dollars. Luckily we won the bet with him using a simpler word like 'sea'.
After that, we did more word association, except keeping it to ourselves this time, he would write a word on the board and we would write down the first thing that came to mind, no matter how stupid. Luckily, I didn't think of anything too outrageous, this is what I came up with,

Mountain = Sea
River = Ocean
Tree = Branch
War = Blood
Music = Sight
Rain = Shine
Star = Bright
Aroha = Love
Lightning = Strike
Teardrop = Fall
Ocean = Water

He then asked us to make a poem, not lifting our pens until we had finished writing, I wrote my original poem twice, as I thought the first seemed a bit wordy and didn't sound as good with all the 'and's' and 'only's'. The first one I'm showing is the original, the second one is the rewritten version that I feel is a lot better than the original piece.

Original

Blood's fall,
tainted with aroha and love are the sea's, oceans, rivers,
bright strikes illuminate the sight,
blood branches torn, fallen, lost,
bright loves only to have their shine fade,
sight and way have fallen to bloods strike,
only when the end is near,
love will be in sight,
only when the end is near,
light will be in sight,
with shimmer and shine,
with hate-tainted blood washed away,
washed away only with water flooded by aroha.

Rewritten

Blood's fall,

tainted with aroha and love are sea's, oceans, rivers,

bright strike illuminated sight,

blood branches torn, fallen, lost,

bright love to have it's shine fade,

sight and way fallen to bloods strike,

when end is near,

love will be in sight,

when end is near,

light will be in our sight,

with shimmer and shine,

with hate tainted blood washed away,

washed away by aroha.

I am so glad to have attended this workshop as I had an amazing time. Apirana Taylor was able to help me find an inspiration to write something with meaning and passion, something I haven't been able to achieve myself in months. There were parts I didn't understand during the poetry reading's as they included some Maori words I didn't understand, but besides that, I couldn't point out a thing I didn't enjoy.