(for Visesio Siasau)
On the first night of creation

Hikule’o turned the sea upside down

and shook it out, the way an old lady shakes out her purse

for a bus driver.

The sun fell out of the sea

like small change. 
On the first day of creation

Hikule’o drew squares and triangles

with her unstumped hand.

When she was finished

her characters looked at each other,

shrugged shoulders, cracked knuckles,

and shook their almost-perfect forms

into kinks and bulges and blurs.

They walked away, into the world. 
On the edge of a clearing

a man and a woman coupled,

doubling their imperfections,

becoming one beast.

The goddess’ harelip moistened with joy.
On the second day

Hikule’o gave the world a will of its own.

Tides muscled the channel

to Fanga’uta lagoon. The whip and the fly-whisk

prepared persecutions. 
On the third day the goddess felt suddenly alone

as she walked between plantations.

She turned, and saw her shadow flee

across a field, then disappear into a hedge

where hibiscus eyes waited. 
On the fourth day

Hikule’o began her diary.

Her pen worked like a spade,

tunnelling forwards in time

to sons and usurpers.

She read a page aloud

to the future, and mistook the silence

for applause.
On the fifth day

Bishop Berkeley stood in ‘Atenisi’s seminar room

and denied the existence of space and time.

Hikule’o dropped him down a well

one of Maui’s heels had made.

The bishop fell like a lucky coin. 
On the sixth day Hikule’o walked through Nuku’alofa

and took a table at Escape Cafe.

Lo’au read the New Zealand Herald aloud to her,

without knowing it was almost a week out of date.

Hikule’o yawned, and dropped the morning moon

into her teacup, then yawned again, and watched the moon dissolve

like a lump of sugar.


Lo’au: Tongan culture-hero who taught navigation and sailed to the end of the world.

‘Atenisi: independent school in Tonga associated with free thought and the pro-democracy movement.