The Particularity And The Dream Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

The impressively monikered Karl du Fresne
Has just given ‘social scientist' Camille Nakhid
A good wigging for expressing the view
That immigrants should be given longer shrift.

Karl grew up in a small Hawkes Bay town
And he walks across his lawn every day
In the Wairarapa to write in his shed
For the Pakeha Establishment in Wellington.

Actually, I'm amazed at how tolerant
Our new immigrants are about how stuck
Up and up themselves the Old Chums
Are about their tightly-held corners.

And I think Karl is missing something
When he snides that we can safely assume
That people immigrate to New Zealand
Because it's infinitely better than the place they left.

...

And I get pissed off when the Oxford Companion
Makes a big point of the fact that Allen Curnow
Was a fourth generation New Zealander
Who lived in a succession of Anglican vicarages in Canterbury.

And that the keepers of New Zealand literature
Quibble about whether Greville Texidor or Eve Langley
Exhibited a sufficiently restrictive desideratum
In articulating a New Zealand particularity or ‘common problem'.

And that Kendrick Smithyman slags
Tanned, earnest Slavic Polynesian faces
Or that David McKee Wright assumes that
The native who is a brother is a Pakeha.

Or that my beloved Iris Wilkinson
Talks so casually - so disparagingly about Nigger Jack...
Or that Tariana Turia cites an enormous public ignorance
That is starting to become actual hostility towards Maori.

...

Time to give some ground, time to move on
Time to open things up and make some space.
Let's face it, a quarter of us were born abroad
And then there are the more and more mixed.

Maybe the New Chums from Cambodia, Tonga
China, India, Iraq, Somalia, Nepal and Kingdom Come
Really need a bit more slack so that we can all pull together
To bring up the future with a golden tether.

The young, the best, the intelligent, brave and beautiful,
Have made a long migration under compulsions they hardly understand -
New generations are homing from distant shores
Imprinted with this destination by their dreams.

And an extraordinary thing may be happening.
From the edge of the universe, New Zealand
May become not only the site of our own dreams
But a place where the world wakes refreshed.