When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
Page 21
and the songs of birds and mo‘o, that cope
with our years of slow unknowing, somehow.
It was not long ago that ‘ōlelo
was silenced, along with its dying race,
who lived, then thrived, reverting to the old
knowing words. English could never replace
the land’s unfolding song, nor the ocean’s
ancient oli, giving us use again.
‘elua
Like the sea urchin leaves, pimpling its shell
as its many spines let go, turn to sand,
my great-grandfather’s Hawaiian words fell
silent, while his children grew, their skin tanned
and too thin to withstand the teacher’s stick,
reprimands demanding English only.
The ban lasted until 1986,
after three generations of family
swallowed our ‘ōlelo like pōhaku,
learned to live with the cold, dark fruit under
our tongues. This is our legacy—words strewn
among wana spines in the long record
the sand has kept within its grains, closer
to reclaiming our shells, now grown thicker.
‘ekolu
Ka ‘Ōlelo has a lilting rhythm
arising from the coastal mountains’ moans
as they loosen their salted earth, succumb
to the ocean and its hunger for stone.
It carries the cadence of nā waihī,
born from the fresh rain in nā waipuna
and flowing past the fruiting ‘ulu trees,
wiliwili, kukui, and koa.
It holds the song my grandfather longs for
most, as he remembers his father’s voice,
and regrets not asking him to speak more
Hawaiian, so that he may have the choice
to offer words in his inheritance,
knowing his ‘ohā will not be silenced.
‘ehā
Think of all the old words that have succumbed,
their kaona thrown oceanward for English
words we use like nets to catch the full sum
of our being, finding too little fish
caught in the mesh, even as we adjust
the gauge, reshaping them to suit our mouths.
I must admit I love the brittle crust
my clumsy tongue’s foreignness forms; it crowns
the dark, churning pith of prenatal earth
rising in the volcano’s throat, unspoken
for now, founding my wide island of words.
And kaona, a ho’okele’s current,
circles during my wa‘a’s slow turn inward,
steering my tongue through each old word learned.
‘elima
As the ‘ape shoot, whose delicate shoots
shoot forth their young sprouts, and spread, and bring forth
in their birth, many branches find their roots
in the dark, wet ‘ōlelo the earth bore.
My unripe tongue taps my palate, my teeth,
like a blind ko‘e that must feel its way
through the liquids, mutes and aspirates of speech,
the threading of breath and blood into lei:
“E aloha. ‘O wai kou inoa?”
I ask, after the language CD’s voice.
“ ‘O Kekauoha ko‘u inoa,”
my grandfather answers, “Pehea ‘oe?”
So, we slowly begin, with what ‘ōlelo
we know; E ho‘oulu ana kākou.
JOAN KANE (1977–), Iñupiaq, was born in Anchorage, Alaska. She attended Harvard University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. Kane’s accolades and honors include the 2014 Indigenous Writer in Residence fellowship at the School for Advanced Research, judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize, recipient of the 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, along with fellowships and residences from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Alaska State Council on the Arts.
Variations on an Admonition
I have played with the skulls of seals
And feigned them to be children.
I will tell you of the black spot
Constantly before me–
I had tried hard to make land,
But the coast has altogether vanished.
I ask that you keep your eyes shut
Until the sound of the swarm
Above has passed, that you mind not
A certain brightness. After all,
I have whittled you into life-size–
I will divide you into many men
With time for me to gather
The bones of all sorts of animals
And stir life into them.
Nunaqtigiit
(people related through common possession of territory)
The enemy misled that missed the island in the fog,
I believe in one or the other, but both exist now
to confuse me. Dark from dark.
Snow from snow. I believe in one—
Craggy boundary, knife blade at the throat’s slight swell.
From time to time the sound of voices
as through sun-singed grass,
or grasses that we used to insulate the walls of our winter houses—
walrus hides lashed together with rawhide cords.
So warm within the willows ingathered forced into leaf.
I am named for your sister Naviyuk: call me apoŋ.
Surely there are ghosts here, my children sprung
from these deeper furrows.
The sky of my mind against which self-
betrayal in its sudden burn
fails to describe the world.
We, who denied the landscape
and saw the light of it.
Leaning against the stone wall ragged
I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it,
I felt, and I didn’t understand:
I am bound to everyone.
LEHUA M. TAITANO (1978–), CHamoru, born in Guåhan, is a queer poet, fiction writer, and cofounder of Art 25. Her chapbook appalachiapacific won the 2010 Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. She is also the author of two poetry collections, A Bell Made of Stones (2013) and Inside Me an Island (2018).
Letters from an Island
Hi Everyone. Maria Flores to Shelton Family, 1982.
Hi everyone
I hope you are all fine
as for us we are
just fine
you ought to know how
I fill of writing
I’m not that good so please
excuse me I just make
this cookies for my girl
to remember the old lady
I think the baby can’t
try it I have a gift and
her m___ one m_____
and I’ve other for Leah
and the shoes for Lehua
and the blouse I’ve buy
lady the mama is just
are 500 the blouse is 6 or
I hope you all like it
please write to me if you
recived it did you recived
the one that Lanie mail it
I ask Lanie and she said
she just mail it the other
day I want to thank you
for the meat
it really good
Mary give me a ring
but it fit on my small
finger please
don’t tell her
that I’m giving you something
tell Mary if she want me
to come I’m ready
just
send my ticket
CEDAR SIGO (1978–), Suquamish. His published works include Stranger in Town (2010), Language Arts (2014), and Royals (2017). Raised on the Suquamish Reservation near Seattle, Washington, Sigo later studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He is
the editor of Joanne Kyger’s There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera (2017).
A Small Secluded Valley
Your portraits are all thin indians
Half their faces edging out the fog
Where sparks rain onto our temple, where I enter
to write the names of my poems for the night, Daybreak Star
and The Sun, both of which
I never got around to
For want of love and allegiance in every second, my regrets
you interrupted. Offset in the kind light as a crown.
(Evan’s walking around sounds behind a closed door)
Nice to see you, to walk a bit and stop, as on a river,
its lava shut under in a tunnel of love, regardless
the visions hike up overnight and flames trail off like
the finest spider’s thread slipping my mind.
After Self-Help
All my rooms are alien
Towers of books tilt & crumble
at the least extended breath
A matinee beyond recall
Brown birds pale breasted darting through
Too Late Hello Later
Kiss the lights and they change
out over the Stardust
Cities are huge machines for sorting poets
Skating down the cellophane-enfolded hills
Even cast off lines have their own pull and rhyme
Man at leisure ripped out of my mind
Lonesome after mine own kind
Hot black—soft white—warm reds
Mine a thinking man’s cartoon western
Mine the one who enters the stories
Mine the evergreen tears brushed with coral
The boat in the box is mine and mine the full sky
CATHY TAGNAK REXFORD (1978–), Iñupiaq, is a poet and playwright. The author of A Crane Story (2013), illustrated by Sini Salminen, she has received fellowships from the First Peoples House of Learning and the Rasmuson Foundation. Her play Whale Song premiered at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska in 2019.
The Ecology of Subsistence
No daylight for two months, an ice chisel slivers
frozen lake water refracting blue cinders.
By light of an oil lamp, a child learns to savor marrow:
cracked caribou bones a heap on the floor.
A sinew, thickly wrapped in soot, threads through
the meat on her chin: a tattoo in three slender lines.
One white ptarmigan plume fastened to the lip of
a birch wood basket; thaw approaches: the plume turns brown.
On the edge of the open lead, a toggle-head harpoon
waits to launch: bowhead sings to krill.
Thickened pack ice cracking; a baleen fishing line
pulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish.
A slate-blade knife slices along the grain of a caribou
hindquarter; the ice cellar lined in willow branches is empty.
Saltwater suffuses into a flint quarry, offshore
a thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin.
Alongside shatters of a hummock, a marsh marigold
flattens under three black toes of a sandhill crane.
A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream;
underneath, arctic char lay eggs of mercury.
Picked before the fall migration, cloudberries
drench in whale oil, ferment in a sealskin poke.
A tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel drum;
she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson.
DONOVAN KŪHIOŌ COLLEPS (1978–), Kanaka Maoli, was born in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, and was raised on the ‘Ewa plains of O‘ahu. A PhD candidate in English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, he is also a production editor at the University of Hawaiʻi Press.
Kissing the Opelu
For my grandmother
I am water, only because you are the ocean.
We are here, only
because old leaves have been falling.
A mulching of memories folding
into buried hands.
The cliffs we learn to edge.
The tree trunk hollowed, humming.
I am a tongue, only because
you are the body planting stories with thumb.
Soil crumbs cling to your knees.
Small stacks of empty clay pots dreaming.
I am an air plant suspended, only
because you are the trunk I cling to.
I am the milky fish eye, only
because it’s your favorite.
Even the sound you make
when your lips kiss the opelu
socket is a mo‘olelo.
A slipper is lost in the yard.
A haku lei is chilling in the icebox.
I am a cup for feathers, only
because you want to fill the hours.
I am a turning wrist, only
because you left the hose on.
Heliconias are singing underwater.
Beetles are floating across the yard.
CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ (1980–), CHamoru, is a poet, scholar, educator, editor, and publisher who has won several awards and honors for the four books of poetry in his series from unincorporated territory, including the PEN America Literary Award for Poetry (2011), an American Book Award (2015), a Lannan Literary Award (2016), and the Elliot Cades Award for Literature (2017). He cofounded, with Brandy Nālani McDougall, Ala Press, a publishing company that specializes in Indigenous Pacific literature. He is an associate professor of creative writing in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
GINEN THE MICRONESIAN KINGFISHER [I SIHEK]
[our] nightmare : no
birdsong—
the jungle was riven emptied
of [i sihek] bright blue green turquoise red gold
feathers—everywhere : brown
tree snakes avian
silence—
the snakes entered
without words when [we] saw them it was too late—
they were at [our] doors sliding along
the passages of [i sihek]
empire—then
the zookeepers came—
called it species survival plan—captured [i sihek] and transferred
the last
twenty-nine micronesian kingfishers
to zoos for captive breeding [1988]—they repeated [i sihek]
and repeated :
“if it weren’t for us
your birds [i sihek]
would be gone
forever”
what does not change /
last wild seen—
ISHMAEL HOPE (1981–), Tlingit and Iñupiaq, grew up surrounded by both Tlingit and Iñupiaq cultures. He is the son of poets Andrew Hope III and Elizabeth “Sister Goodwin” Hope. In conjunction with his poetry, Hope has coordinated festivals, performed as an actor, and been a lead writer for the video game Never Alone (Kisima Innitchuna), which visualizes traditional Iñupiaq lore.
Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea
Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to band together, form
a lost tribe, scatter as one, burst
through rifle barrels guided
by the spider’s crosshairs. We need
to knit wool sweaters for our brother
sleeping under the freeway,
hand him our wallets and bathe
his feet in holy water. We need
to find our lost sister, last seen
hitchhiking Highway 16
or panhandling on the streets of Anchorage,
couchsurfing with relatives in Victoria,
or kicking out her boyfriend
after a week of partying
in a trailer park in Salem, Oregon.
Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to register together,
lock arms at t
he front lines, brand
ourselves with mutant DNA strands,
atomic whirls and serial numbers
adding ourselves to the blacklist.
We need to speak in code, languages
the enemy can’t break, slingshot
garlic cloves and tortilla crumbs,
wear armor of lily pads and sandstone
carved into the stately faces of bears
and the faraway look of whitetail deer.
We need to run uphill with rickshaws,
play frisbee with trash lids, hold up
portraits of soldiers who never
made it home, organize a peace-in
on the walls of the Grand Canyon.
We need to stage earnest satirical plays,
hold debate contests with farm animals
at midnight, fall asleep on hammocks
hanging from busy traffic lights.
Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to prank call our senators,
take selfies with the authorities
at fundraisers we weren’t invited to,
kneel in prayer at burial grounds
crumbling under dynamite.
We need to rub salve on the belly
of our hearts, meditate on fault lines
as the earth quakes, dance in robes
with fringe that spits medicine, make
love on the eve of the disaster.
CARRIE AYAĠADUK OJANEN (1983–), Iñupiaq, grew up in Nome, Alaska. Her family is a part of the Ugiuvamiut tribe, whom the federal government relocated to Nome. She received her MFA from the University of Montana. Her debut poetry collection, Roughly for the North, was published in 2018.
Fifth Saint, Sixth & Seventh
Gabriel, sing great-grandpa’s song,
head thrown back, black hair gleaming
gray at your temples. So handsome, you,