Months Of It
p. 75 · Read in the full issue
By Albert Wendt
Months of it, a sun in paralysis grips earth sucked dry, cracked, a death ripeness in the forest —wild pig and pigeon escape the hunt into untracked mountain fortress.
Heat chokes our food gardens, ground is arid stone, burns fingering root and footprint of water in the dead stream.
In fale drooped in a long thirst flies splinter our gasping mouths.
Bone and skull ascend through our ragged hides, only the lick of rain can quench their sure climb.
Unaccustomed to such ferocious grip we articulate hope of rain, the memory of tongue fat-bellied nourish our hungry children on.
Lagoons cannot breathe, fish claw muscle of coral for shade, baited hooks dangle to no unwary victim, spears idle in herod hands, our canoes locked in the fire-clear conscience of water.
Into cool sea-floor dying seaslug burrows, measuring the slow suck of tide, terror in stalking shadow of stingray, the flip of shark fin.
The octopus feeds on its tentacles, frenzied rip and tear until crippled, dies.
We net only reefs bleeding, the hush of winds that will not blow, horizons teethed like our sharp hunger.
On seaweed furrowed beach dry like the pubis of a barren aunt, we deny ancestry to honest cannibal but ravenous grip of belly mocks denial.
Months of it, our bodies scaled down to a true integrity by a cannibal sun. In our famine abandon hope for the lean bone of wisdom, myth to ease our suffering.
Left, Albert Wendt, of Western Samoa. He is principal of Samoa College, and is already an established writer whose poems have been published in the NZ literary journal, Landfall.
He has been the driving force behind one of the most creative college magazines in the South Pacific. Futa Helu (right), of Tonga, is principal and founder of Atenisi Institute. He was trained in many aspects of Tongan traditional culture by the late Queen Salote.