Eti Sa‘aga was born in Apia, Sāmoa, in 1950. He attended Samoa College and has worked as a heavy equipment driver, translator, planter, journalist/photographer and a radio and television commentator. He has made American Sāmoa his home for the last 30 years, and is currently a United States Congressional staffer. He was married to the late Otilia Hunkin and they have four children, and three grandchildren.
In the calm after six days
of the most violent hurricane in decades,
my then two-year-old son looked
at the stripped landscape and said:
‘Daddy! The mountain is all naked!’
I realised what he meant years later
after a bitter divorce from his mother.
Nightfall comes so fast
it pins me on the bed
and drugs me
to a restful sleep.
I swear I can
hear my hair grow.
Outside,
the wind noses
at the wall,
lifts its left hind leg
and splatters on
the concrete and grass
a steady shower
with the golden message:
‘I wuz hea!’
I dream I am
in Heaven sneezing
from the cold of
Nightfall.
It was the eve
of the new moon
that my daughter
gave me a pebble
for my birthday.
It was gift-wrapped
with tiny fingers,
sticky with mango juice.