Sapasui
that hot summer i told you
i was too grown up
to be your little girl. stubborn
in your loving dadness
we settled on big little girl
in name only it seems.
the same afternoon you made
sapasui i opened the lid
to find a fly. that’s country life.
‘ia won’t eat much’
you joked of course but i’d seen
The Fly and wouldn’t eat it.
in the city i cook sapasui
with your grandies, we eat under
windows wide open.
they forget they haven’t
met you. i forget the film about a fly.
i remember our family’s head chef.
it’s your recipe pa, but i'm always
missing the main ingredient.
Lisa Stanley (samoan/pākehā) is an emerging writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work appears in a fine line, Flash Frontier, Turbine / Kapohau, Yellow Lamp Poetry, takahē, Landfall Tauraka, and elsewhere. Her poem “sapasui” appears in loving memory of her father, Mark Josaphat Stanley (1951-2009).
