“When the Kuaka Returns” is structured around movement rather than arrival. The kuaka are known for their long migration and precise return. Here, they offer a way to think about distance as an ethical condition rather than a metaphor. 

Each section traces a different register of leaving and coming back: bodily, linguistic, generational. The poem resists resolution, ending instead with attention. 

Listening for what persists when home is no longer a fixed location but a practice of return.

Topher Shields is a poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. His work examines inheritance, migration, and the moral afterlife of place, often through coastal ecologies, ancestral silence, and embodied ritual. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, The Shore, The Bangalore Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, DIALOGIST, Half and One, and elsewhere. He began publishing internationally in 2025.