Fire Spirit

By Sharol Taifa, Grade 8, Gorari Primary School, Kokoda LLG, Sohe District, Oro Province

This poem is about the burning fire. Every morning i wake up and make a fire to warm my body.

I stare into the burning fire

I see leaping figures,

     wildly dancing.

Their red and orange arms,

     waving, waving.

Are the spirits trying to escape

     the person?

Or the tree trunk that is burning? 

I sit and watch for hours, 

     wondering til

Finally the dancers grow tired and sink

     to the ground

Leaving a heap of ashes behind

     to mark that mysterious place

And a few charred remains

    of blackened wood.

Published by Ples Singsing

Ples Singsing is envisioned to be a new platform for Papua Niuginian expressions of creativity, ingenuity and originality in art and culture. We deliberately highlight these two very broad themes as they can encompass the diverse subjects, from technology, medicine and architecture to linguistics, music, fishing, gardening et cetera. Papua Niuginian ways of thinking, living, believing, communicating, dying and so on can cover the gamut of academic, journalistic or opinionated writing and we believe that unless we give ourselves a platform to talk about and discuss these things in an open, free and non-exclusively academic space that they may remain the fodder for academics, journalists and other types of writers alone. New social media platforms have given every individual a personal space to share their feelings and ideas openly, sometimes without immediate censure. The Ples Singsing writer’s blog would like to provide another more structured platform for Papua Niuginian expressions in written, visual and audio formats while also providing some regulation of the type and content of materials to be shared publicly.

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