My father’s house is a fabulous country;

a brazen tower, a thunder pole in the sky,

a flower glowing through the dark city,

impregnable armour against rank invaders.

The right and left flanks of this house are

fragrant with my mother’s pride, the jasmine pink

she dyed the roof, down walls into the kitchen sink.

I remember when my father built this house;

he bought gravel and timber with mother’s pains;

his blood mixed in the paint decorates its walls.

We presented our hunger sheets as zinc and asbestos

while our famished eyes refracted the sun’s light.

He built it during those dark days of the town

when our dream was untethered, hopes unknown.

The surging sea to starboard of the house,

stark Mount Opurudu loomed on the left;

trapped between two cyclones in our town,

my father’s house exuded grace in a chasm;

dismissing chagrin and angry confusion,

the unbridled rivalry of unreasonable gods

who’d make our archipelago a saga of loss–

a bridge too far for humans to cross.

In my father’s house are a million mansions,

rooms teeming with feet like multitudes of sand,

doors like stars, gateways to the sun and moon,

for the lost to find their way back into homes,

there to sleep and dream of paradise and fun;

for the sea to beckon and oceans to swell,

celebrating a star circling like a giant wheel

spinning night into light in my father’s zeal.

There’s nothing spectacular in my father’s house

except for a long-drawn yawn of the ruffled gods,

who sent foxes to fetch flowers for the people

to wage war on account of desecrated shrines;

on the water, in the air, and on treetops and sky

they marched to protest the surrendered games,

their kidnapped destiny, the destroyed dreams,

as love bled, brains seized, and blood ran in streams.