GLENN COLQUHOUN

Press & Upcoming Events

Just letting you know I'm back from walking Te Araroa so I'll update this page now with any upcoming readings in the next few months.

From Three Women - expected 2024

About three o’clock in the morning I woke to an elderly man and his younger nephew being welcomed onto the marae. There was a general rustling in the whare as a few people popped up. Most stayed asleep, well used to all this coming and going. I watched the old man huff up the wide step to the doorway while his nephew helped him to take off his shoes. But from the time he entered the room he set his eyes on the body at the far end of it and made his way there unaided. Nothing else mattered. And as he walked he chanted. I didn’t know what he was saying. But I knew without doubt he was talking to the dead.

For a time he stood in front of his cousin. The chanting finished and he began to speak. A woman beside the coffin dabbed at her eyes and smiled. Heads nodded and chuckles broke out at times from those listening. The conversation he held with his cousin was intimate, as though they were sharing a drink. It flowed like river water, gurgling, lapping, and bubbling.

What struck me most, however, occurred after the speechmaking and other formalities of welcome. Left alone to complete all that had been said, and knowing that these were to be his last words to a loved one he had come to see in the middle of the night, he sang. I had heard plenty of singing before that. I knew to expect it. It was what he sang and the way he sang it that shook me.

The range of notes open to him drew themselves back to only one or two trusted old birds.

But how they flew, bumping into every corner of the room before soaring out the window and off into the sky. They were elemental. For a time they created a space where nothing else seemed to matter. I am still moved whenever I think of it.