by Irrira Rikki

Created on: June 10, 2008   Last Updated: August 13, 2008

NOW, IS MY TIME
Time for me was as a never ending quantity; a space where distance was measured by the sun, the moon and the stars. When the sun came up, we got up. How long it took to walk around our South Pacific Island home? I only knew on arrival back, the measurement was, three times sun, and three times moon. If it meant going across the water to another Island, we simply arrived when we did.

Always the sun would tell us when it was going again. Even the birds knew this. All the colors of the sun's stained glass window in the sky, painted tropical colors between the light and dark times. Everything that lived in the sun, would find shelter.

Nothing was ever still. The saltwater creatures of the rocks and sand told you when the sea was coming to cover the reefs where we had walked. Or when it was going away again to gather with the deeper oceans. Time was a stillness of silent sound, and bursts of noise.

Then evening had arrived. This time was another time, when everything that lived by the moon, stirred and stretched. Then moved in restless communes, to come alive again from their slumber, and the heat of the day. Flying fox, moved out of their trees like noisy teen-ages.

Massed moving shadows of wind driven clouds, swirled in the last of the spectrum, spreading their webbed night wings. All to join the feast, only they knew where. Smoke wafted from where the last sounds of children's' laughter was settling down to sleep on their grass woven mats, in their thatched roved huts.

Then the electricity switched on, all over the skies. Mother Nature's night entertainment, flashed through the air, filling spaces that were unseen in the sun. Splashing and spilling sheets of silent lightning where it willed, in its' own momentum. Each sheet of light blended into the next, as spectacular as the last - without storm - never ceasing in wonder.

Then when she chose, fire-works of embers, burst higher into the cloak of darkness - thrill and awe never ceasing - despite the regularity of volcanic nights. Nothing was ever still in Nature's Time. Then it was our turn, to torch a mosquito coil, and climb under the nets, while their persistent hum droned us to sleep.

Other times it was a different drone. More threatening - distant at first, then closer - and we knew the bombers were on their way, then overhead. Most passed us by: unless with more violent explosions, one did not make it.

These came down in flames of fire and a whining noise you could not get out of your ears, til they

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