They share hollow thoughts, they're just clones,
Harbouring a plague of bloodthirsty tones.
Violation begins,
Spreading their deadly sins.
Motivated by the cries and moans.

New Zealand culture,
a fragility,
tainted by violence.
Colonisation.

Writers have examined,
the loss of Maori land.
Less common however,
is writing concerned with
the benefits,
accruing to white people
as a result of the acquisition
of this land.

Colonisation has provided,
Economic and social advantages,
to white people,
in contemporary New Zealand.

A hierarchy,
white Western culture,
sitting uncontested,
at its pinnacle.

The cultural capital that whiteness provides.
Unearned advantages at our disposal.
Live our lives with greater ease:
Homeownership.
Health.
Education.
The ‘Justice’ System.
Institutional privilege.
A political separation.

The white New Zealand system,
designed for whites.
To get through school,
have good health,
get jobs,
get a little justice.
If the system was designed,
for Maori people
it would not be the way it is now.

Overrepresentation of Maori,
in every
negative
New Zealand
social statistic.

The persistence of *******.
Society provides greater opportunities,
to white people,
by disadvantaging those who are not.
Unacknowledged,
debilitating, racism.

Being oblivious,
sustains a belief,
in white superiority.

While factors:
socioeconomic status, gender,
sexuality, disability,
may impact the degree to which,
individual white people,
can access privilege.
On some level,
every white person,
in New Zealand
benefits from their skin.

And the very last, the endling,
Caged in the sunlight at Beaumaris Zoo,
Tired of the poking and the prodding
Paced out of existence into history,
Into emblem and icon
Legend and label,
On to things protected by copyright,
Footage and fable,
And the internet's electric jungle,
And into that great white emptiness
Of extinction,
That giant ship which we are building,
Stacking and storing,
Fitting and filling,
Recording into the grand voyage
Of oblivion.

At this deep pool
Where no light is reflected,
Where small birds come
Clinging to the vine
Amongst fallen logs and silences,
The crush of leaves and the rot of years.

At this dark edge
Where now unassailable trees tower
In a brief clearing,
At this still centre where the wreckage lies
Of river's breach and storm's rage.

Here at the heart.

Where once the workings of long-ago men,
The wild, roaring, toothless ones,
Desperate and dislocated,
Their fierce eyes blazing through dark,
And bodies by day burning through timber,
Cut sunlight in shadow
And nation in nature.

And these men that made the land,
That wove their dreams with dust and dirt,
That needed death to know the flower,
Men of the corrugated country.

Men of bones,
Propped in the rusted windy ruins,
Who watched the movement of the birds
And bartered life with sky and earth.

Men of the drought's bare-cupboard cradle,
Biblical through plague and famine,
Who struck the water in the stone
And fought with flesh to swell the soil.

Time's weathered toys,
Who sought a garden in the sand,
Where the withered streams of the dry season
Flowed with flooding summer rains.

Men of the dark deserted spaces,
That masked their ruined stars with drink,
That fed the shadows with strange desires
And drowned the broken plough with tears.