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Flying-Fox

Albert Wendt

More rat than bird,
more superstition than fox,
you hang from that banyan
branch like a deflated black
umbrella and, when you flap
through the sky across a waxen
moon and the dead rise up
to haunt me, you’re more
real than Batman.

With your razor-sharp teeth
you eat the ripe mangoes
and pawpaw in my plantation;
but wait until I catch you:
I’m going to skin you, gut you,
roast you, and eat you.
I’ll enjoy the eating because
I’ll be chewing Batman,
Count Dracula, and all superstitions
about vampires.


Albert Wendt

from Inside Us the Dead (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1976)

Reproduced by kind permission of the author.

Tags:

animals bats fruit Halloween heroes & villains meat preditors Samoa supernatural

About this poem

This poem, representing Samoa, is part of The Written World – our collaboration with BBC radio to broadcast a poem from every single nation competing in London 2012.

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Albert Wendtb.1939

Albert Wendt was born 1939 in Apia, Samoa. Wendt studied at Ardmore Teacher's College and at the Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with an MA in History. His Masters' thesis was about the Mau, Samoa's independence movement from colonialism...
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