MAUATUA FA’ARA REYNOLDS
Ta’aroa gifts Tāne skin
I was but a boy when the shore delivered you late one evening.
Half-formed. Gelatinous. Swollen with salt-water.
It was by chance that the artisans would discover you
on their return from the fire,
all flushed and proud.
They knelt in the faint trail of your breath,
eyes wandering your body, wondering
how to sculpt life from a clot.
I watched them unsheathe their tools
to whittle you into a God.
But you were not ready;
you were too naked, too
young.
Maybe I should have said something then, but
before I could, you shivered and bled brine.
The mass of you split in two,
down the longitude
of your body like a red hibiscus
flowering in moonlight.
Wide-eyed, flailing their arms and the heads of their adzes,
the pink-faced artisans stumbled to the hinterlands.
Still without warmth, still
without life, you were alone again.
This is when I came to you
(I’m sure they were still watching).
Like them, I knelt at the sigh of your bloody heap.
How strange were those glittering beads upon you
which, in the dying light of the half-red sun,
could have been blood, tears, or seawater.
How selfish I was to think of myself at that moment.
How I built the world from my body,
the world I clothed with my skin when I was skinless.
But you were still shivering, bleeding, glittering.
I saw myself, and chose to give
what I could not have.
I thought of the millions of skins I gifted to naked trees
and summoned them for you.
May you be rough
May you be porous
May you be full of fissures
May you be shining
May you be prickly
May you be sensitive
May you be warm
May you be light
Ano’ite o Tapa / L’Art D’Essayer / Ars Poetica
Only once the parchment is laid to rest on the table,
and is undisturbed by any chance of breeze or risk of fire,
can the ink settle into the page
that is the skin, that is the tapa.
Once safety is certain, it will not sit idly
on top, waiting and resisting rest.
The ink blot will sink into the bleached ghost of tree fibres,
spread like roots and remind us: all things must settle
into themselves and let what is above dissolve into
what is below. But the ink was always destined to
rest in paper — everything is marked with meaning.
The ink is settling into the page now. It is dreaming.
Are you listening?
What would happen if we looked at tapa the way we look at a page?
Would our stories finally be given colour?
And when I say ‘colour’ I do not mean technicolour, I mean pulse.
Because what is colour
if not a sign of life,
a sign that something here knows
light.
And when I say ‘story’ I do not mean fable, I mean body.
Because what is a story
if not a living thing
that is birthed, holds other bodies, and births
more
bodies.
And when I say ‘our’, I mean these storied bodies
that have not been given
the grace of being bodies
or having stories.
And when I say ‘these’ I mean ours,
I mean mine.
Would you hear my pulse?
Would my body be light?
Listen to Mauatua Fa’ara Reynolds read ‘Ta’aroa gifts Tāne skin’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mauatua Fa’ara Reynolds is a Mā’ohi-Norf’k writer and tapa-maker, working in and against the colonial archive. Their writing is fuelled by their ancestors’ material and oral storytelling, as well as the storied landscapes they descend from. Fa’ara Reynolds is the winner of the 2025 Letteri Prize in Creative Nonfiction.