A Shaded Flower (To Father, who misunderstands me) You’ve let me flourish within a colourless age A skin, neither white nor brown veneers the ancestral purity of my Polynesian being. You’ve sent me to learn the honoured wisdom of the white —the very missile to make perish our own treasured culture. And I grow up a Samoan immigrant to mine own forefathers. Do not despise me then, dear Father ’tis the work of time, and age, I have been born a shaded flower flourishing on the grafted plant of the native, and the white man. Thus — a victim of a cultural conflict speaking the pidgin-tongue living the artificial cult of a ‘brown pakeha’ in town. By PERENISE TAPU
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Bibliographic details
Mana (Auckland), Volume 2, Issue 3, 4 May 1978, Page 3
Word Count
118Untitled Mana (Auckland), Volume 2, Issue 3, 4 May 1978, Page 3
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