Editors’ Blog:

Community Poetry with Craig Santos Perez

Featuring:

D. Keali‘i MacKenzieMike Fraser

Tagi QolouvakiJulia WietingBryn Villers

T-man Thompson

Copyright © 2013 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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A Note on This Blog

ENG 713—one more reason to celebrate Craig Santos Perez. In this semester’s “where it’s at” creative writing seminar (Contemporary Pacific Poetry & Poetics), Craig initiated a poetry response project to the recent molasses spill in Honolulu Harbor. Craig’s dynamic mind is matched by his commitment to community poetics and thrilling pedagogy. In this editor’s blog, I am proud to feature works by D. Keali‘i MacKenzie, Mike Fraser, Tagi Qolouvaki, Julia Wieting, Bryn Villers, and T-man Thompson.

—No‘u RevillaHawai‘i Review Poetry Editor

Kanaloa RespondsD. Keali‘i MacKenzie

There are more ways to drown than you realize

a panicked escape deep, below my surface - a slow descent away from the sun - in your own vomit blocked by stomach acid -

- gilled animals drown in air starved for the right combination of oxygen and hydrogen, you’ve seen them flail about.

This is something new.

sugar cane refuseproduced to fatten cattle for the slaughter,to slake the appetite of fast food and ever hungry markets.

- To drown, choke from all that molasses - what is the cost of an ecosystem? as if these waters weren’t polluted enough by industry, military, tourism, tourists - so sweet the green in your pockets how damaged the wet at your feet.

What does sea water and thick, molassesed sugar taste like? feel like? here, bring your lips close. sip this mixture, more intoxicating than kava and heavier than the salty blood in your own veins.

David Keali‘i is a queer poet of mixed Kanaka Maoli descent who was born and raised in Nipmuc territory/Western Massachusetts. His work appears in, or is forthcoming from: Mauri Ola: Contem-porary Polynesian Poetry in English (Whetu Moana, Volume II), Assaracus: a Journal of Gay Poetry, XCP:Cross Cultural Poetics, and Hawai‘i Pacific Review. He was also a member of the 2009 Worcester Poetry Slam team that competed at the national poetry slam held in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Together Against DisastersMike Fraser

V1There is a menace in the oceanThat stirs this body into motionThe livelihoods of the people are at stake hereWe must stand as one and protect what we hold dear

CH:This is where we beLiving of the land and the seaThis is when it really mattersCome together community against disasters

V2:Why is it the people always hurtCorporations, our land they pervertThey, are the root to this evilWe, must stand as one people

CH:This is where we beLiving of the land and the seaThis is when it really mattersCome together community against disasters

Br:No longer can we be ignorant to things around usRemoving toxicity from our land is a mustInjustices rampaging, all through the ‘ainaGather yourselves and set your souls fire

CH:This is where we beLiving of the land and the seaThis is when it really mattersCome together community against disasters

Statement: The molasses spill has caused some in the community to suffer. This song responds to a general disinterest in wanting to help these people, let alone care. It also pushes forth the value of standing as a community and using our resources and our talents against injustice. It is my hope that people come together as a big ‘ohana to stand against injustices everywhere.

Michael Fraser is an unclassified grad at UH-Mānoa. He enjoys writing songs and, because of Craig Perez, his direction in song writing is dealing with injustice in the community.

SukaTagi Qolouvaki

“More than 26,000 fish and other marine species in Honolulu Harbor suffocated and died as the molasses spread and sank to the ocean floor about 5 miles west of Waikiki’s hotels and beaches. The spill happened in an industrial area of Honolulu Harbor west of downtown, where Matson loads molasses and other goods for shipping.” —AP

Dua

May your fossil fuel blood-lines shrivel inthe heat of Maui’s noonday sun

May the he‘e that is your war-machine be lured by the cowrie bait of Oceania’s fishermen and women for meat on our children’s tables

May your dollar-bill idols leap with you to Burotu

May you choke on your high-fructose corn syrup molasses and GMOs over breakfastlunch and afternoon teas till you know the pain of Papa

May Tangaloa dream you a million deaths

And Hinenuitepō refuse you the dark and cool embrace of earth’s children

Rua

how do we survive stolen children?

gunned down indigenous men?

molasses spills that drown

our fish?

how do we love sugar as it strangles the breath of

moana nui?

Tolu

my bubu lived for sugarevery day she ladled four tablespoons into her ceylon teaover her quaker oats and coconut rice

sugar made her smilewide and toothlessfor tea and porridge may be eaten without dentures

sugar brought war between the matriarchs of my familymy bubu and my mother raging at each other over the dining table as we cut her sugar intake in halfthen wholein concern for her failing health

sugar made her scheme borrow small containers of crude brown from the neighborsmuch poorer than we

sugar makes my mother and I weep as we continue to miss her and remember how we denied her pleasures

but my bubu also loved fishcawaki, nama, yaga . . .

i imagine her response to bloated and floating salt-water corpses“Weh . . . sa maumau!”

Va

i spent my adolescence in a town grown up around sugar

walked the hour-less kilometers to school through the dustof cane

tall stalks of sweet grassbands upon bands of green, red, gold and green againmapped our boundaries

hot days ballooned with the smoke of cane burneddown to the soilblack and brittle

the scent of milled sugarleaked into our dreams on nights cool and cloying

school breaks when the heat ripened mangos and flash-dried the wash on the linesmy cousins and i sat on doorsteps

sweetness the stem of refrigerated dovu in our hands

sweetness the tearing of coarse stalkmethodically with our teeth

sweetness the mouthfuls chewed dryand spat into the communal pile before us

Lima

sugar is british colonial rule sugar is native lands stolen by white settlers for plantationssugar is girmityas fed lies who survived the long journey over oceans from native to alien lands and enslavement sugar is the blood of girmityas, itaukei and blackbirding slaves from vanuatu and the solomons to fatten the pockets of settlers and the native elite sugar is sacred dovu made toxic through refinement and poisoning the vanua

Ono suka is to return

degei dakuwaqa daucinaremember your lost childrenforgive us our sinsdeliver us

suka is to return

What the pōhaku said Julia Wieting

In this decayed canal among the hotelsin the bright moonlight, the springs are singingto the hidden graves, about the cloakthere is the empty cloak, only the wind knows.It has no bearer, and no name, dry bones can name someone.Only an ‘ō‘ō stood on the banyan treetooktook tooktook tookin a flash of memory. Then a broken pipebringing deathAla Wai was stinking, and the dusty streetswaited for death, while the black cloudbloomed at a distance, inside Ke‘ehi.The ocean choked, gasped in silence.Then spoke the pōhaku GLUGGive: what have we written?My friend, treacle poisoning my heartthe awful sticking of a moment’s blunder which an age of prudence can never eraseby this, and this only, we have subsistedwhich is not to be recorded in our bibliographiesor in memories shaped by the beneficent schoolsor under promises spoken by the authors at handGLUGSympathize: I have heard the phraseturn in the mouth once and turn once yetwe think of the phrase, each in her poemthinking of the phrase, each confirms a poemonly at moonrise. Our upper air. Rumors?Revive for a movement a spoken claim.GLUGControl: The boats respondedsadly, to the hands expert with rod and hookthe sea was too calm, your heart would have respondedsadly, when informed, beating disobedientto controlling hands I looked upon this shore,fished, with the drained ahupua‘a behind meshall I, at least, see these lands in order? In every hole the sea came up, till it could come no more Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. He huarahi kua takahia—O shoofly shooflye ho‘opōhaku, e noho mālie

These fish guts we must shore against our ruinwhy then, isle, e ke‘ehi lō‘ihi. Matson’s drowned again.Give. Sympathize. Control. Aloha Aloha Aloha kekahi i kekahi

_______________________________________Notes:

l. 42: qv. “At the sea shore.” Stevenson, R.L. (1913). A Child’s Garden of Verses.l. 43: I answer without fear of being shamed. Dante, Inferno (XXVII, 61–66; translated by Hollander and Hollander 2000); Eliot uses this as part of the epigraph for “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”l. 44: the trodden pathways; shoofly is synonymous with molasses (see shoofly pie).l. 45: stay, rest quietly. qv. Pukui and Elbert (1986: 334)h.l. 47: march forward.l. 49: love one another uniquely (appropriately). I heard this ‘ōlelo no‘eau from retired lawyer Leigh Wai-Doo, speaking of his mother’s attitude toward his polio.

Statement: This poem adapts the latter half of “V. What the thunder said,” which is the final section of “The Waste Land,” by T. S. Eliot. I have been working to adapt the entire poem over the course of the last three months, ostensibly in response to a class I audited on Hawaiian activism and the law. Through this adaptation, I hope to convey to the reader a sense of concern about and exploration of the development of Waikīkī, which I’ve chosen as a metonym for the legal fights in post-overthrow Hawai‘i generally.

Within this final section, I’ve chosen to reference Matson’s molasses spill as both a specifically tragic event and one which could be the catalyst for movement and healing. To do so, I’ve transposed El-iot’s concentration with spiritual desertification onto real desertification, at least within an urban core that is layered over traditional ways of knowing and managing the land, and specifically the watershed. The previous sections of the poem are centered around Waikīkī and especially the Ala Wai canal, which is why the narrative shifts focus in the beginning of this poem thence to Ke‘ehi Lagoon.

Selected hints: reference to the ‘ō‘ō should indicate the perils (and echoes) of extinction; reference to Stevenson creates a bridge to the first section of the poem, as well as evoking the birthright of all child, viz., to play unimpeded at the sea shore; reference to Dante is a response to Eliot’s weaving of Dante’s work through the original poem, as well as to situate this journey of knowing and learning within the set of consequences provided within the Divine Comedy; finally, the name “Ke‘ehi,” meaning “to trample or march,” among other meanings, is cognate with the Māori word “takahi(a),” which is a nickname I was given when I danced haka—to march and trample means to immediately disrupt, with or without some future gain. Ideally, the gain will be for the good of the many, rather than the good of the few, or the one.

Julia Wieting likes to write poetry, often at the exclusion of other important tasks. Other priorities include her husband, her cat, the Prime Directive, and perusing fantasy books.

FisheyesBryn Villers

Fish don’t know why they die—suffocation in orout of water,on the line,in the shallows,eyes distending,at the dock,on the rocks,over flames,draining veins—They probablydon’t even recognizewhen a brother or a sister dies;but we do.

LinerBryn Villers

Perhaps, if the anchor’s next tripwent one waywe could all be happy.

Statement: “Fisheyes” was partially inspired by the image of a puffer plastered all over the Internet, eyes swollen and cloudy. It deals with human stewardship and responsibility for nature on an overt level, also human-to-human and animal-to-animal interactions and a few other issues also.

“Liner” comes in part from the Matson name. The “t” in Matson is anchor-shaped, and being one of only two major ocean delivery liners for the island, it is in many ways an anchor keeping the islands moored in the metaphorical bay of the commercial consumer industry. It can be taken as both a bless-ing and a curse, in that we are tied so heavily to other places for our goods (including but not limited to food) and yet we are provided with products that it would impossible to manufacture here (and who would approve of the factories?) because of lack of resources. A limited discussion as there are both deeper and broader issues.

Bryn Villers is a first-year student in the M.A. creative writing program at UH-Mānoa. His poetry is often very tangible in form, though implicating much broader and impactful issues than are presented at the surface. Believing that all things are intended to teach and communicate, he intends to raise questions in the reader’s mind about the way they interpret as a reflection on broad worldview and personal perception. He also has a B.S. in Zoology.

Answers from the Ama’amaT-man Thompson

Death spilled in to my hale today, with consequences greater than deathThe Kumulipo can tell you

Not this Kāne, whose feet, calloused from months trapped in Doc Martens rubber, feel ‘āina no more

Not that Kāne, whose heart, callous from weeks trapped in Tori Richard cotton, hears ‘āina no more

Not this Kāne, whose hands, callously miming for days trapped in Dove-ultra soft, love ‘āina no more

Not that Kāne, whose ‘ōpū, hangs over just far enough to block me from his makaLying

On the sidewalkAt his feet

Dead.Death spilled in to my hale today,

as I’m not yet guarded by the pūhalaThe Kumulipo will tell you

Not this KāneNot that Kāne

Statement: This poem was written in response to the recent molasses spill in Honolulu. As I watched the different news coverage of the spill, read articles, and viewed the many photos being disseminated, it became clear to me that everyone was discussing the spill in terms of the scientific and economic impact it would have. Yet no one talked about the significance of this disaster in terms of Hawaiian culture. My poem is trying to highlight the hollow nature of the discussions being had, which includes the lack of feeling, in all aspects, in the words of those who were “concerned” about the spill. What the significance of the Kumulipo is in this poem is the reader’s responsibility.

T-man Thompson is a second-year M.A. studying Pacific Literature. He was born and raised in Lā‘ie, Hawai‘i and received his B.A. from Brigham Young University-Hawai‘i. He is of Hawaiian, Maori, and Samoan descent and writes about South Pacific cultures.

www.hawaiireview.org

Hawai‘i Review Staff, 2013-2014

Anjoli Roy, Editor in ChiefKelsey Amos, Managing Editor

Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, Design Editor No‘ukahau‘oli Revilla, Poetry Editor

David Scrivner, Fiction Editor

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