Quote by Hone Tuwhare: “Man, you will not fold them as leaves, or spread them as rain.”

This line from Tuwhare's famous anti-nuclear poem speaks to the tree — and by extension, to nature itself — about what nuclear weapons do that the natural sun never could. The atomic sun does not give life in cycles. It destroys absolutely and permanently. The contrast makes the horror precise and intimate.

No Ordinary Sun was published in 1964 during the height of nuclear testing in the Pacific. France and the United States conducted atmospheric and underground nuclear tests in Polynesia and the Pacific throughout the 1950s and 60s. Pacific peoples bore the environmental and health consequences while having no political power to stop the tests.

New Zealand Māori poet of Ngāpuhi descent, celebrated for his deeply sensory and often playful engagement with nature and working-class life. His debut collection No Ordinary Sun, published in 1964, was the first solo poetry collection by a Māori author. He was named New Zealand's second Te Mata Poet Laureate in 1999.