On my first day in the village

the men dug a fire pit

and filled it with leaves and the cuts of a fat sow

that had been led across a field

and then killed

on a strip of corrugated tin.

This is how we used to cook the priests,

said the Chief.

In 1830 the missionaries docked with books

about God and sin,

how flesh was evil – both to eat and bare.

Last year I jumped down from a truck with a cardboard box

crammed with copies of the National Geographic – glossy features

on lions and space,

the lit cities wired to the dark globe.

There were stories on rain and famine, the machines of war.

How oil wells

burned in a pockmarked desert.

But what the orbiting lens

did not capture

was the tail of the Milky Way

twinkling

in a palm tree

as I walked back stoned from a night of dance

and kava – the peppery soma drunk from wooden bowls,

or human skulls,

if I believed in the old sots

cackling and slapping their thighs

when I sipped

and gritted my teeth.

The magazine also failed to report

on the mornings in a clapboard school

where children

sang the teachers into class,

and wrote poems in chalk about parrots, and fish

drifting in a stream.

There were no photos of the silence when ripe fruit

dropped from a branch

and into my hand.

Or how the Chief and I dived on the wreck

of a Chinese trawler

as sea snakes

circled above.

By then I was swimming in the Pacific like a local, and I believed

in the fable of truce between men and sharks,

that the world was a myth

on a printed page,

a Technicolor epic in smoke and flame.

Fiji was shortlisted for the 2020 Fish Poetry Prize, adjudicated by Billy Collins.