Pule was born in Niue. As a young man he gave voice to a poem about a great sad love he experienced and fitted in a love song to Polynesia. The Bond of Time was first published in 1985 and a second edition in 1998. The whole thing is made up of five-lined unrhymed stanzas, each self-contained.
The Bond of Time aches about things that could be and how memory and fantasy can bring up other feelings:
I'm writing of misplaced things, a shirt
on a gorse bush, an apple in the classroom,
a necklace in a sinking boat; a suitcase
of poems and love-letters on a ship,
a farewell on a wharf.
You are on your way, past romantic
towns, over bridges where rivers under
ripple with vibrations, as your body
ripples when I kiss and lick your thigh,
and love you till both are exhausted.
It is great to have this little New Zealand classic back in print.
- Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry.
