Forget Me Not Poem by Dr Ronnie Bai

When the Forget Me Not blooms
on Chatham Island,
she displays no bonanza of colours or shapes
vying the strutting fashion modals,
nor does she transmute any sensual fragrance
tantalizing the smirking social celebs.
Her broad dense foliages crouch
humbly to the dark unforgiving sod,
trembling to cover her tiny clusters
of little blossoming white pentagonal petals,
already beaten black and blue
by the unrelenting South Antarctic winds.

When the Forget Me Not blooms
on Chatham Island,
she reads no tales of chivalric love
mesmerizing the love birds,
nor does she trumpet the air
of an expensively exquisite bouquet
proclaiming to commemorate the departed.
Her orbicular green leaves undulate
generous glabrous breasts, boasting
the resplendent veins overflowing
with mana dew, forever suckling
the full-blooded Morioris*
that are no more, though.

When the Forget Me Not blooms
on Chatham Island,
she looks out to the blue Pacific Ocean,
and rejoices to see under its sparkling surface
no current of tribal woe flow,
for when she blooms,
so do her seedlings and seedlings
all over Aotearoa.**

*Moriori: the indigenous people of the Chatham Islands, the last full-blooded
of whom died in 1933.
** Aotearoa: the most widely known and accepted Maori word for New Zealand