Sorry

Sorry. I bet regular visitors to this blog will have imagined that I had ceased harping on about Easter Island. Wrong. It's still in my thoughts a lot and I am currently reading "The Enigmas of Easter Island"(2003) by John Flenley and Paul Bahn. Fascinating new speculations rooted in available evidence.

When I was on the island, I began scribbling a journal which until today I hadn't looked at since I got back. After years of battering away at computer keyboards, I had almost forgotten the rather different and somehow more intimate process of handwriting at length. I filled a notebook hardbound with a Jacquard silk design that a science teacher in my old school had given me on the day I left. Thank you Barbara.

And another apology. Regular visitors may recall that occasionally I will break out into poetry. I have seen several psychoanalysts about this, even tried electric shock therapy but it's an urge I just can't control. I successfully suppress it for weeks and then it floats back to the surface like a rubber duck in a bubble bath. The trip to Easter Island - Te Pito te Henua (The Navel of the World) - inspired me to scribble several poems in my journal and here's one of them. I wrote it on the five hour LAN flight back to Chile:-

Hanga Roa

In Hanga Roa panting dogs

Pursue a bitch in season

By the supermercado

And Tavake's bar

As a moped whines past

Pursued by a silver-starlight four by four

Made in Japan

Once the moai makers

Walked here

Marveling at the dying of days

And these vast night skies

Pricked with uncountable

Platinum peepholes

To the other world

By fires of toromiro branches

They respun old stories

Of their island-world and

Of the endless sea and the enveloping sky

As the moai cast

Elongated moonlight shadows

Over their ancient ahu

Those dogs scurry off

Behind the Hotel Orongo

You can hear the Kare Kare dancers

From Tahiti

Their harmonies tangling

With the pack's expectant barking

As lights from the east

Predict another LAN arrival

From Chile faraway.

Mataveri airport

Glossary:-
Hanga Roa - main settlement on Easter Island whose primary source of income is now tourism
moai - the familiar stone giants
toromiro - the island's native tree, now virtually extinct
ahu - the stone platform on which moai were erected
Hotel Orongo - named after the ceremonial "birdman" village to the south west of the island
LAN - Chile's national airline