20151007

Vaughan Rapatahana




I carry a rage
it gnarls my shoulders
& corkscrews my eyes
into a question mark
of conniption.

Wittgenstein ultimately
      surrendered;
just could not
punctuate his language
     i
        n
           t
              o
            sub
     m i s s i on.

yet the question
endures the same:

       why
     are   we
mis   interpreted
all      the     time?


e pīkau ana ahau he riri
kua rerehe taku pokihiwi tēnei
me e wairori taku mata
ki he tohu pātai
o te keka

ki te mutunga i Wittgenstein
     kua whakahauraro
kāore e tāraro ia tonu
nāna te reo
     k
        i

              h
                 e
     tāpaetanga

te pātai anō
e whakataumaha anō

  e whakaparori
      māua
te   taima   kātoa
he aha ai?
I carry this rage
e pīkau ana ahau tēnei riri
“The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother-country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth




    he patai

           e asked, 
         h               so
       s                   who
                              are
                             you
                           really
                         because
                       you
                  seem
                  to
                  warp
                  constant
                  from
                  day
                  to
                  day?


                  i
                  don’t
                  know.




Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Atiawa) now resides back in Aotearoa-New Zealand, with homes also in Tin Shui Wai, Hong Kong and Pampanga, Philippines. He has been fortunate to have been published widely internationally and his latest collection of poetry, Atonement, was jointly published in Hong Kong and Macao earlier in 2015.
 
 
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