‘Dear Matafele Peinam’
By Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

Dear Matafele Peinam,
You are a seven-month-old sunrise of gummy smiles.
You are bald as an egg and bald as the Buddha.
You are thighs that are thunder and shrieks that are lightning,
so excited for bananas, hugs and our morning walks past the lagoon. 5

Dear Matafele Peinam,
I want to tell you about that lagoon,
that lucid, sleepy lagoon lounging against the sunrise.
Men say that one day
that lagoon will devour you. 10
They say it will gnaw at the shoreline,
chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees,
gulp down rows of your seawalls,
and crunch your island’s shattered bones.
They say you, your daughter 15
and your granddaughter, too,
will wander rootless,
with only a passport to call home.

Dear Matafele Peinam,
Don’t cry. 20
Mummy promises you
no one will come and devour you.
No greedy whale of a company sharking through political seas,
No backwater bullying of businesses with broken morals,
No blindfolded bureaucracies are gonna push 25
this mother ocean over the edge.

No one’s drowning, baby,
no one’s moving,
no one’s losing their homeland.
No-one’s gonna become a climate change refugee. 30
Or should I say:
‘no one else’.

Because, baby, we are going to fight.

This is a poem for an English comprehension topic for grade 9.
I have two questions -

1. In Lines 46 to 59, the poet uses anaphora (repetition). Identify an example of this anaphora and explain the impact of this technique on the reader.
2. In stanza two, the poet uses juxtaposition. Identify which two ideas are being contrasted, and explain why