I am returning to Baxter: that Poet, that Catholic hippy. He whom threw Maori into his poetry.

The poem is from the Australian Poetry website so they have to add a glossary: Hatana is Satan, but Pakeha for NZ eurpoean (Generally British) is well established in NZ English.

And Tena Koe is a polite greeting: more than Hello. There is respect in it.

Personally, I like the illusion to lice and cigarettes while people write and say he is a guidling light.

And that he attributes the idea that he is a poet to Satan.

From Jerusalem Sonnets

One writes telling me I am her guiding light
And my poems her bible—on this cold morning

After mass I smoke one cigarette
And hear a magpie chatter in the paddock.

The image of Hatana—he bashes at the windows
In idiot spite, shouting—‘Pakeha! You can be

‘The country’s leading poet’—at the church I murmured, ‘Tena koe’,
To the oldest woman and she replied, ‘Tena koe’—

Yet the red book is shut from which I should learn Maori
And these daft English words meander on,

How dark a light! Hatana, you have gripped me
Again by the balls; you sift and riddle my mind

On the rack of the middle world, and from my grave at length
A muddy spring of poems will gush out.

James K. Baxter, 1970