Tuesday Poem: Savai'i

Savai'i


she steps into the garden

on slender feet

under a hat of brimming whiteness

a startling face of teak




and round her skirts

a hundred blue butterflies rise

their wings

snippets of sky 

                                               

                                              Mary McCallum

I posted this poem a year ago after the tsunami in Samoa. I have been working on another Samoa poem to put up here but I'm not quite sure its ready so I pulled this one out. The new poem is named after the other main island Upolu. Savai'i is the 'Big Island'. Both places are magnificent. Here's the full post explaining ... 


For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill in the sidebar. The hub poem is an extract from The Time of the Giants by Anne Kennedy - one of my favourite poems ever. 

Samoa once

Savai'i

she steps into the garden
on slender feet
under a hat of brimming whiteness
a startling face of teak


and round her skirts
a hundred blue butterflies rise
their wings
snippets of sky
                                              

                                              Mary McCallum

We were in Samoa 12 years ago. We stayed for six weeks. We stayed on Upolu where we swam in the deepest bluest pool with secret chambers inside the rocks, ate palusami and papaya, saw a church with an enormous round window without glass that framed the sky, and swam with schools of iridescent fish - one of which, a trigger fish, bit our son. One night an enormous beetle flew inside the shirt of our friend Leo as we sat outside in the moist night air drinking whisky. In the evenings, we drove past the matai in their shirts and dark lava lavas flanking the road. 


Every day I would try out the Samoan my friend Lualemana Tino Pereira had taught me long before that: Oamaioi? Manuia fa'afetai. I read Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel and that got me inside the fales, inside the minds of the locals, just a little bit. When we took the ferry to the 'Big Island' of Savai'i, a young woman on the upper deck told me she wasn't allowed to read Figiel because the author told stories she shouldn't about what went on inside the fales. The young woman saw the way our boys didn't always listen to what we said. She asked what my husband would do to them when we got home.


On Savai'i, we saw the blue butterflies at a place run by a family of Samoan Italians. Our younger son climbed trees with the grandson of the woman in the white hat; he picked up enormous beetles and held them in his hand. On Savai'i, we swam in a pool with giant turtles and saw one wrap its flippers - surely, lovingly - around the man who cared for it. We climbed a secret 'pyramid' that could have been built as a tower to watch for Tongan invaders. We jumped off rocks into waterfall pools and slept in a fale on the beach and watched our chubby baby daughter carried around on the hips of young Samoan women as if she weighed nothing at all. 


Back on Upolu, we stayed a few nights at a smart resort to end our visit. It was called Coconuts. It rained nearly every day but it was always hot - a hot wet heat that didn't allow things to dry properly. It was like we were always swimming. When the rain cleared, the sand was white and the water blue, a kind of perfection. One morning we woke to the news that Princess Diana had died.


Every night at Coconuts, an older Samoan man sat outside our fale to guard the baby while we went to eat. I would sit with him sometimes after we got back and we'd talk in halting English/Samoan. He told me where all his family had scattered to: New Zealand, Australia. Like many Samoans, he told me these things with pride. The children were making money and sending it back. They were doing well, achieving things. We managed to exchange a lot of information despite the language differences - so many Samoan words are similar to Maori, with an 'l' where the 'r' is. So many words for family don't need translation. Each night he would ask me, Oamaioi? And I would reply, Manuia fa'afetai, oamaioi? Manuia, he would say. Just fine.

Memory is a benediction

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much, who has gained the respect of intelligent men, who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of Earth’s beauty nor failed to express it; who looked for the best in others, and gave the best he had; his memory is a benediction.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) also attributed to Bessie A. Stanley

This is being read at a service on Thursday afternoon UK time to remember my friend, NZ-born Kirk Stephenson, who died tragically in London a couple of weeks back. It is apposite. Kirk lived life flat out - doing more in his 47 years (juggling travel, work, friends, family, tennis, opera...) than many would do in two lifetimes.

The sentiment in this piece is beautifully expressed, I think, finishing with the reassuring idea that 'memory is a benediction'. I gather it is much used at funerals so I must have heard it before but while I remember the odd phrase, I don't recall the whole piece (especially that bit about the poppy).

According to my brief internet research, the Stevenson attribution is in fact incorrect, and Emerson (another popular choice as author) is also wrong. US writer Bessie Stanley, they say, wrote the piece for a competition: a 100-word essay on ‘What constitutes success?’. It was published, apparently, in 1905, although people are divided on where.

It's understandable it would be sheeted home to Stevenson. G.K. Chesterton said he was a man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins."

I have been to Vailima in Samoa where Stevenson lived his final years as Tusitala ('Story writer') and died suddenly aged 44. My son, despite being told not to, sat at the desk where the Scottish author wrote, and I breastfed my baby daughter on his wide and airy verandah while my oldest son read a child's version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde beside me. We walked up Mt Vaea to Stevenson's grave where the tablet bears his 'Requiem':

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Now I read that and think: '44, he was 44.' Never until now has it seemed so young.

Then I see Kirk's name written formally on the order of service that was emailed to me, and beside it the dates 1961-2008, and below it the names of the pieces of music he loved, and the names of people he loved and the words they are to stand up and read, including the piece at the start of this post, and I realise that while words are reassuring in this situation - are touchstones, charms, prayers - ultimately they make no sense. Forty-seven makes no sense. Like the man at the summit of Mt Vaea, he'd only just got started.