Poetry Series: Poetry written post suicide for Indigenous youth in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This series of poetry and prose was written to provide a cathartic examination of self. I use poetry to illustrate the darker corners in us as Indigenous people, and the darkness that sits in our souls, diminished as we are, in some ways, through our lives in this world. Through poetry I talk to the experiences of all those people I have been in touch with, who passed through suicide, in a means to acknowledge them, and love them, and hold them in my heart and in the hearts of others. Most of all it is about the experiences that mar us and darken our light, and in which, through beauty and words, we and I rekindle hope in others and light their fires again.