DEAR GAELENE, by Mercedes Webb-Pullman

I’m pitching a script about a journey
discovering new lands. A clever captain
but he’s shipwrecked. A remarkable
love-and-murder story illustrated
by the captain and his new navigator;
he is English, and she Polynesian.

(Quick back-story about a Polynesian
woman who sets out on a journey
inspired by dreamed maps, a navigator
who steers to a fame-hungry captain.)
Same old love story, easily illustrated.
His insanity makes this one remarkable.

Native canoes are truly remarkable;
trees thanked before use, Polynesian
design, local rangatira illustrated –
leaf, tree, thicket. This new journey
worries the shipwrecked captain.
Can he really trust his navigator?

He’s lost his heart to his navigator.
She steers by stars through remarkably
open seas, subverting his role of captain.
In his mind history shifts, Polynesian
society beams him visions; a journey
through death, through fire, to life, illustrated.

His designs hatch into life, illustrated
dreams lie, show him his navigator
on a dangerous, double-crossing journey.
In a cataclysmic shift of passion, remarkable,
the once-beloved, once-worshipped Polynesian
is seized and tortured by her captain.

He’s no longer sane, her captain.
He kills her. And he eats her. Illustrated,
shocking. A woman, native Polynesian
in an alien world, brave navigator
of life, her way of death remarkable.
Imagine a movie of the whole troubled journey;

a lovely Polynesian navigator, wooed
by the shipwrecked captain; their remarkable,
sad, and morally illustrated journey.

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