"Blue rain from a clear sky. Our world a cube of sunlight – but to the south the violet admonition of thunder."
Born in the Cook Islands and orphaned at the age of seven, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell grew up in Dunedin with little acknowledgement of his polynesian background. He impressed critics with his first collection of poems in Mine Eyes Dazzle (1950). After a fifty-year absence, he returned to the islands, and is now considered a mediator between polynesian and pākehā poetry.
ELSE UNIVERSE EDGE ELSE UNIVERSE EDGE
a clear violet thunder from sunlight
Our sunlight Of thunder clear the Blue
world of sunlight clear the violet sky
but sunlight cube of admonition