Sunday, March 4, 2012

Day 957: This is the poem that will open my thesis

DAy 957: What they cannot see: A mele from Hiʻiaka to Hopoe

I saw you dancing in the distance
You pulled my glance with the diction of your dance
You
Of unimaginable magnetism
moving over the land like water over itself
moving like mist
like promise
With a name that speaks too much of your magic
Warns of the way, I would never again be able to look beyond your forest
Nānāhuki,
Too heavy for the diphthong of my tongue
Instead let me call you Hōpoe
As if I have been the one to see you gathering parts of yourself in the form of yellow lehua there
As if I had been with you from the beginning
As if were only waiting for the pahu to sound for our dance to begin within each others bodies

You created of this stranger in me
A lover
Let me cover your body in sacred flowers of different colors
let me plant you a forest of rumbling lehua trees
each blossom a promise to return, my love
to move within your dance again
for your rhythm to find home in my mele

Can you see those strange men
Watching us from beyond the page
From under this breath
Can you see the way they have drawn us naked and grown
How they have missed your skin feathered with yellow lehua
How they have done you no justice
How they have written us into stillness
Into silence
how it seems through them,
we have been forgotten
how we have barely existed


I wonder how it is they cannot see
I wonder what has made them so blind

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