Born and raised in Rangitukia on the East Coast of the North Island, Arapera was a teacher and poet, and one of a small group of Māori writers writing in English during the 1950s. In 1959 she was awarded a special Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award for her essay ‘Kō taku kūmara hei wai-ū mō tama’. She was married to Swiss-born Pius Blank for 44 years and had two children, Marino and Anton. For the last ten years of her working life Arapera taught te reo at Auckland Girls’ Grammar School and was known affectionately by the girls as Ma Blank.
(on looking at other people’s houses)
E ki, e ki, waiho o maunga,
Hei paepae kōiwi, whare tipuna!
Kei hea a Tāmaki-makaurau
Kua riro nei a Maungawhau, Maungarei, Ōrākei!
I built my home in shadows deep
beneath the mountains
close to where the river rippled
glimmered gave life to earth and me.
I did as I was told!
My bones now ache with
fish-hook gripping pain
from endless damp,
with kūmara vine to the water’s edge.
Sewage reeks where mānuka grew,
tūtae laps on every shore
and kūtai beds grow fat, alone,
like worms in burial places.
Where is my mana now
When strangers strangle living bones?
On Maungawhau, Maungarei, Ōrākei
padlocked in by high-rise boxes
soft-silk, teak-lined, richly furnished
concrete structures, living tombstones?
Dear departed ghost, I ask you now,
What have you done to me
who followed the KAWA,
shared my mana with other people
who wonder why I,
the tangata whenua,
chooses to live in shadows deep?
For my bones no longer sing!
I thank you for coming
in response to my call
to play the part
of a lawyer
and an interpreter
of the many facets
of the Pākehā world!
Perhaps you will become
a sower of seeds
that yield abundance,
and have a place
in this world – of –
turmoil, that pains
the heart of humanity.
like a garden of kūmara,
and your vines reach out to
those in need.
May your family grow,
and emerge, like flowers blooming
over the wider world.