“Malo ‘e Lelei

Tiki Tabloid Supplement, Volume 1, Issue 3, 20 December 1943, Page 4

“Malo ‘e Lelei

(GREETINGS—GOOD DAY) “Malo lelei, white man, Malo lelei. Where do you go so early? To Vaikeli! Ai‘e, so far and the day so hot. Stay awhile and smoke with me the cigaletO'— see, here is a tree for shade and to lean against.

Later someone will pass, and —do not doubt—will help you on your way. The day is long yet. Here breathes a breeze to stir the palms in soft leaf talk. Soft speech to write in a book. Your book of memory! So many books have you, Papalangi—and so little wisdom. So many words you write, but so much you do not see. Grey pages —counterfeit for feeling. Tomorrow —soon —you go back, and the next day you will forget. For there will be the touch of your woman and the hold of your children! And again the keen race and thrusting grasp for life. And, between a breath and a sigh, you will be old; sitting under a tree seeing in cigalato smoke those things gathered by memory from the days that have been and cannot return.

Good things they will be, for in memory' there is little of pain, and less of evil. So fold carefully into this greatest of books, vivid things from Tongatabu. Live these days with eagerness and zest, savouring each moment as a gourmet would; searching out each final essence of colour, scent and spirit, to store in faithful remembrance. Discard the dross. See only the good. Unmeasured days stealing to rest in scented sheets of night. Wayward breath of orange flower and tangerine. Opal fire of Kingfisher’s flight. Lantana

creeping; Flambouyants, hard and bright as sin. Soft purling of tahine laughter in the trees. Brown, baby bodies —pale, graceful green of young banana rows. Sky’s blue laughter in a depthless sea. Hibiscus—not a name in a book, but heart’s blood splashed on a hedge, and Bougainvilleaa royal robe thrown against a tree. Ships standing nobly by against the sky beyond the reef.

Passing, too, go Caroline and Finan, Fika and Tonga Lil, to mingle tears with that other Magdalene; but with you is the taste of age-old delights in strange new vessels. Freely yielded are the voluptuous secrets of their bodies meanly bargained for nor jealously withheld. A Royal gift of price made proudly with a laugh in which will be the echo of a —when you

are gone. These things and more paint clearly with stong, sure touch, each Sheet complete with some fresh thing, and thread them through with many inter-woven tendrils, bright-dyed with the stuff of these daysfor age grows dim of sight— close them reverently away against your time of need. Then, long in after years when the fire is gone from your blood, and tomorrow has lost it’s call, one day you will sit where there is leaf talk or curl of smoke, and you will find these sheets alive before you again. And as fluttering finger of memory turns each page a happy sigh will rise and whisper “Malo lelei, Papalangi, Malo lelei.” • * * * *