Tabua

Lyrics

Cool in the palm.Heavier than ivory.Heavier than bone.Polished with sand and coconut oil until it holds the light.This was born in the deep dark.In the great head of a Physeter macrocephalus.A tooth from the jaw of a giant who sings in the cold Pacific.Hunted by men in canoes.Brought ashore, a treasure of risk.Worked for a lifetime by hands we will never know.Braided with sennit, the fiber of island life.It smells of the sea and the smoke from the Bure.This is not for the market.You cannot buy bread with this.You use it to ask for a life.You use it to say you are sorry.Its value is the story it carries.The name of the chief who gave it.The peace it made.The child it welcomed.A currency of connection, not of things.October tenth, eighteen seventy-four.Ratu Seru Epenisa Cakobau holds a tooth like this one.The air in the meeting house is thick with the future.He speaks softly.He doesn't give a stack of gold.He gives a single tooth to a Queen across the water."Thereby finally and for ever ceding Fiji."An archipelago for a promise, held in a whale's tooth.This is not for the market.You cannot buy bread with this.You use it to ask for a life.You use it to say you are sorry.Its value is the story it carries.The name of the chief who gave it.The peace it made.The child it welcomed.A currency of connection, not of things.We think money is a number.A thing we can count, a thing we can spend.But what if it's a memory?A weight of obligation.A beautiful, heavy knot tying one person to another.This tooth remembers the pressure of every palm.It holds the echo of every whispered negotiation.Its genealogy is its worth.Cool in the hand.A single, perfect tooth.It asks for nothing.It means everything.Tabua.