E rima na

Mercedes Webb Pullman

 

dealing with the dead

 

Carians began counting

crests on helmets

devices on shields 

 

to number the dead

 

when solid handles

replaced their weapons’

leather thongs

 

*

 

afterwards

they scraped earth into the pit

beat it down with their hands

laced the pit with cloth

wove baskets of flax to hold

the spirits they’d buried

 

*

 

mountains

rise above themselves

 

bed legs break

waking sleepers

 

73rd day

 

clouds mass in the west

rain wafts across the sky

Arawa’s priest sings incantations

raising winds that blow the prow 

into the whirlpool throat

of Te Parata

 

*

 

our dead warriors stay unburied

until birds tear their flesh 

then covered in wax

they’ll go in the ground

 

*

 

waiting blends strength

with gentleness

 

1 view of eternity

 

in a mountain lake

dragons sleep 

guarding the gate

 

*

 

the boy who tripped in the doorway

dropped the chief’s meat

so the chief ate him

so his father killed the chief’s son

sliced his heart

into a dish of baked kumara

invited the chief for dinner

and served him

this

 

*

 

you get your wife

at the spring fair

beautiful girls cost fortunes

but plain hard-working cripples 

they pay you to take them

 

colonial notes

 

when Captain Cook’s sailors

offered canvas cloth and nails

to Tongans in exchange for

their carvings

young boys proffered their excrement

 

Tongans were not necessarily

friendly

 

*

 

Cyrus changed again

no longer the King’s cowherd’s son

but son of the King

 

exposed on a hillside at birth

raised by the cowherd’s wife with love

not suckled by a wolf-bitch claimed

 

he gained

Persia’s crown

reigned proudly

 

*

 

before resolution

fire rides on water

 

still danger of a wet tail

on a successful crossing

 

return on investment

 

an eagle with golden-red plumage

flies from Arabia to Heliopolis

every five hundred years

bearing his father’s body

plastered over with myrrh

to bury in the Sun Temple

 

*

 

memory stores

words and deeds

like diamonds in a mountain

 

*

 

Maui hid under the bottom

boards of his brothers’ canoe

crept from his hiding place 

when they reached the fishing ground

 

he held his hook

carved from his grandmother’s jawbone

inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the hollow

tufts of hair along the hank

 

he cast to catch a world

 

Mercedes Webb-Pullman was Danse Macabre's 2019-2020 Artist-in-Residence. She is the author of Tasseography (2014) Track Tales (2017) The Jean Genie & Let’s Hear It for the Girls (2018) bitchin' (2019) Periti kau (2022) Tatari (2022) and the Danse Macabre anthologies Amour Sombre, Belles-Lettres, Hauptfriedhof, and Weihnachtsmarkt (2017 & 2018). She placed the only haiku from NZ in 100 Haiku for Peace, an international publication in five languages. Her lucky number is 8. Blue. She lives in Ōtaki Beach, New Zealand.

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