Sogaimiti

The green-blue marks of the tufuga's* tools run down his thighs Patterns in shades of deep-ocean-dark and unsealed-road-like lines Back to his ancestors and forward to his descendants He is young and good in a way that makes it impossible to imagine he might ever become old angry... drunk. He speaks quietly like the 'shhhhhhh' sound his teachers made when he laughed too loudly as a child His skin is brown like the soil used to be and soft, like it still is, underneath the white man's concrete. *Samoan tattooist