My wife and I were supremely blessed when we got the opportunity to move from the Chicago area to Kauai, in the Hawaiian islands, in June of 2007. These are verses I have written in celebration or contemplation of our glorious island, a place where we feel more at home than any other we have ever experienced. Most of these poems have been published on DKos before.
I hope you enjoy a brief journey to Hawaii in these humble verses.
We are on a different planet now,
uncounted light years away from the annihilating exhaustion
of Cold Grey Flatland and the annual
forced migration indoors to face
the Season of Darkness
and the regime of dreary incarceration
amidst the sleeping, barren trees.
We know honest sweat,
and Gauguin skies,
and the joyous feel of dirt in our hands
instead.
And as we turn our faces toward a brazen sun
and land that has never known anything except inexorable
life,
we realize that if our long-ago births
gave us nothing more than the chance
to plant flowers
in this gently smiling place
on the first day of "winter",
then we are thankful for them
for that alone.
There is at least one echo left
of that Edenic majesty of our
sepia-tinted mythology.
It sings a jumbled chorus of
mating calls and lets an impish breeze
swirl through it insouciantly.
It bathes in star radiance and calls forth
from the ruddy, burgeoning earth
its dizzying array of children.
It revels in its ignorance
of soul destroying dawns
and cradles those
privileged to exult in it
like a mother who never grew old
and who will in fact
hold us gently in the hour of our
fortunate death.
It's so unfair
that the ephemeral light
of the lengthening afternoon
can push me around with
such easy impunity.
How dare it
make me feel
so many lost, wordless
experiences from times
I no longer know
and selves
I no longer am.
What right does it have
to grip my heart this way
and make me want
to lose myself
in an illuminated dream
that blurs the line between
the past and infinity?
It's a day for doing
on the spur of the moment.
There needs to be no plan,
no elaborate route
covered with cheery little
colored pins,
no map with notations
written in nice, clear
printing on the side.
Some days
I just don't care
where I'll end up.
And for some reason,
that's usually
when I find myself
in the places
with the most
interesting scenery.
He stands transfixed,
letting the tropical full moon
bathe him in its viscous light,
listening to a world at rest
and asking himself
what grand culmination,
what great project,
what ultimate contribution
will be the denouement
of an uncertain life?
The trivial question falls
to the ground unnoticed
and unmourned,
as he watches the nocturne
in silence.
It takes me into its arms
and erases every desolate Monday morning.
It converts the memory of knife-cutting
Siberian wind into confetti.
It urges me to walk out of
the dessicated lake bed
of my stale anger.
It quietly gets me to turn off the
endless reruns of scenes that
cannot change however many times
I stab myself with them.
In its ever changing light
it reveals eternal verities,
and in its genetic Mardi Gras
it dares me to hope
of what might be.
Its cathedrals are not
the product of leaden,
patient devotion,
but rather were
brought forth
by the unconscious,
multi-million year
unfolding
of an island's
birth pangs.
Its spires loom
with unperturbed
authority,
and in its
impossible cliffsides,
myriad valleys, and
sudden, darkened
sea caves
can be found
the refutation
of all that is
ordinary,
and the reward
for patient
surrender.
(In honor of the Na Pali Coast)
It is the Child
of distant upheaval, having
erupted from Gaia's womb
with insolent energy,
hot tempered and restless,
a brazen interloper
in the community of land.
Blasted into submission
by the implacable depths
and relentless skies,
ravished by raw life,
it was made yielding and pliable,
a malachite gemstone
surrounded by the arms
of its adopted mother.
Come stand in its
indulgent night
with me
and feel the
strength
of its
gentle infinity.