Finding Our Way
'Our Dead are the splendid robes our souls wear.' – from ‘Parents & Children - Albert Wendt’
If there is a beginning shall it be here when Tangaloa-a-langi displaced all radiated energy into the foundations of the earth and sky –gravity pillars which push and pull.
Tangaloa-a- langi- tuavalu / Tangaloa –fa’atupu- nu’u
Begat a sprawling masse of children – maggots! Raised on a stone – creations first breathe -
Fatu the heart, a woman; Ele-ele the earth, a man.
Tuailemafua / Gogosina
Are we not all the ambition of the past, as we stride forward into the mystery of the future?
Posala/ Salima
I research the beginnings of my own creation – afakasi – half caste -
a word I had never heard of; we are Ulberg, we were Ulupe behind our backs.
Ulberg / Ulupe
Imagine me an eight year old boy and my grandmother in Samoa (Tulaele, Apia) in 1978, me homesick and my cousins shout – haa haa- palagi -palagi -hoo hoo
Are we not the displaced, finding a way home?
Doug Poole is a poet, as well as the creator, editor and publisher of online poetry journal blackmail press. His poetry has been widely published in online and print journals and in anthologies, including Landfall, Hawaiian Review and Trout. Of his work he says, ‘The enduring theme of my poetry and ongoing manuscript of Pouliuli [his collection of Samoan poems], is the expression of being Samoan and Afakasi. It is central to me as a poet and writer.’
