Serie (Cherie) Barford was born in Aotearoa to a migrant Sāmoan mother (Stunzner/Betham/Leaega of Lotofaga and the Sāmoan-born boat builder William Jamieson and the families of Ifopo and Fulu [Malia] from Luatuanuu) and a Kiwi (Celtic-Scandinavian-English) father. She also acknowledges Algonquin Indian (Wampanoag) ancestry through the Jamieson line. Her poetry collection, Tapa Talk, was published by Huia in 2007. Other poems and short stories have been published in journals and anthologies, among them Whetu Moana, Niu Voices, Landfall, Poetry New Zealand, Dreadlocks, Writing the Pacific, Trout, Blackmail Press, Snorkel and Best New Zealand Poems.
now that I’m an old woman
I hear breathing in my head
a patina of brown spots
speckle the veined spread
of my knobbly hands
and the nights seem longer
so I dream to pass the time
last night I dressed you with
the scented heads of gardenia
strung with seeds salvaged
from the ocean’s embrace
we slept on an island
floating in the fragrance
of distant mountains
and when the moon rose
rocky outcrops exhaled the heat
they’d snaffled from the sun
to warm our tangled limbs
our secret pandanus grove
turning into clumps
of paspalum spikelets
or our young love
giving way to bile and age
how things change
the littoral forests have fallen
and our grandchildren
speak a different tongue
this morning my namesake
drank tea with me
that smile
she was almost you
Sina’s a good girl
she goes to church
visits me every Christmas
does what she’s told
I want her to stay
but her heart’s elsewhere
tomorrow she goes home
to Niu Sila
our love is a tracking device
more sure than any global
positioning system
just carve us into wooden tablets
then imprint us on opposite corners
of a mighty length of siapo
and watch tusili’i spring forth
over rock-bound starfish
scampering centipedes and
the footprints of bemused birds
we have many stories of
losing and finding each other
of getting lost
and losing others
but today all is well
I lie beneath the old mango tree
smothered with coconut oil
embellished with wild flowers
and droplets of your sweat
your ageing shoulders
still fling back proud
and I still arch towards you
like a young sweetheart
you have whispered in my hair
found again
and we both know
this is our final harbour
I’m aware of sweat running
the channel between heart and belly
spreading into the waistband
of my too tight skirt
sticking to the clammy space
where a babe could be growing
a woman in a terracotta
Mother Hubbard dress
saunters and bonjours me
she’s as beautiful as a deep-sea nautilus
a mollusc with an ivory shell adorned
with reddish brown stripes on the outside
and mother-of-pearl on the inside
she’s wrapped a scarf about her head
frizzy black strands of petulant hair escape
defiant in the heat they will not lie down
smooth with sweat against her scalp
her loose-fitting dress is striped with
pearly lace between the shoulder blades
and on the flared sleeves beneath her elbows
she moves slowly in the heat
hands rubbing her swollen belly
and I wonder if my body
ripening with years
can house another child
survive another birthing
the woman is near her time
I can feel the drag of her babe’s head
positioned to move from buoyancy
into its mother’s arms
we smile at each other
lightly brush fingers
as she glides by