Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two Nov-Dec 2026.
Waingorongoro, poems by Trevor Landers.
Waingorongoro (The river that snores)
Argent coil, ranges to shingle — a spine of water, unbowed.
Ohawe waits; you arrive bearing centuries in suspension,
Once: kahikatea cathedral, tōtara colonnade, root-lace holding whenua to earth.
Titokowaru’s fire — prophet, strategist, insurgent flame against the surveyor’s chain —
answered not with treaty but with torch: raupatu, muru, the ledger of theft.
Barbarity in gaiters and Bible, rancid colonial alibi for plunder.
Now: denuded flanks, plains flayed bare, bone-pale to the tide.
Silt runs thin where forest once ran thick — ecocide’s quiet arithmetic.
Mana whenua pauperised, iwi split to margins, the weaponisation of geography.
Still the river carries what land cannot forget:
awa, ngahere, whenua — one violated body, one undying testimony
the dissidentism, the determination, the rebuke of death
it is snoring, the unsleepable snuffle, it shall not die.
Waingorongoro (a dreaming) II
The river unstitches itself from the map
wears the map as a scar.
Waingongoro dreams backward:
a redoubt grows teeth in a verdant paddock,
the paddock chews on a name it was never taught to pronounce.
Von Tempsky’s boots keep walking
his legs have dissolved into fern-spore;
crossing the Waingorongoro without wetting,
measuring time in muskets & lost opportunities
These stands, shady bush, close their green throat
swallows the sound whole, the voice of conscience,
keeps ringing; children watch the future through a pinhole
burned in the present. Their eyes are the exact colour of the milk,
the amnesia is an ally, the unremarked flow of anti-history.
The eel does not recognise the water. The water doesn’t name itself,
having been asked to carry nitrate instead of names, silt instead of song.
The sacked watchtower blinks like an eyelid that forgot how to close.
It is still deciding who the enemy is, a hundred and sixty years of deliberation
Apocalypse at Waingorogoro on dusk
Griseous skies massing southward
spiteful raging seas full of invective
waves gurning disbelief at the land
obmutescent river mouth forgoes
ancient benediction— discerptment
of brittle Ohawa cliffs and bluffs; like
spoilt parchment toward a roiling abyss,
our spent empire surrendered, sea-coast,
bescumbered, detritus compressed into
short profligate strata, the Anthropocene.
Coastline—abased, drowned beneath
refuse and avoidable oblation— this
wrecked land surrenders, the risen,
merciless sea washes us clean away.
Waingorongoro Conundrum
Perplexed, I am wavering
Is the river natural or man-made
The fish equivocate in turbidity.
it’s like they’ve forgotten
how to be fish, mutant swimmers,
gaping mouths, scintillant scales
It all feels so grief-lorn
and on-edge, like a poem
struggling to kiss the sea.
this river, harbours a desire
to be held by anyone, seen
lamented, saved and loved.
Waingorongoro
You are the river that flows through her,
never happier as flotsam and jetsam,
to have those broad banks breached
and to feel craven to your mercurial tides.
© Trevor Landers
Trevor Landers started writing creatively as far back as he can remember, encouraged by mentors who evinced a love of the luxuriance of language and literature. Published widely in New Zealand and internationally, his latest project is: Landers, Trevor and Hoskins, Tipene (Eds), Ngā Tāngata Tūturu: A literary paean to Ngāti Maru, Lasavia Publishing, Auckland and Berlin, (2026) which will be launched in Taranaki in November. He lives and works in Belgium.