The Rape of My Hawaii

When Roosevelt was President

Your country went to war
This land was filled with discontent

Pearl Harbor underwent
Bombings to settle a score
When Roosevelt was President

Despite his skill, couldn't circumvent
The blazing battle on our shore
This land was filled with discontent

Your boys, they prayed, pledged ten percent
"Please, dear Lord," they did implore
When Roosevelt was President

Your god didn't save not one red cent
Home in a box sailors went galore
This land was filled with discontent

I painted my face to represent
An American version of a whore
When Roosevelt was President
This land was filled with discontent 

--Kukana Wong 1919 - 1962

(written by Susan Budig)

Space

Alone
Being
Cosmos
Dione
Existence
Fool's Paradise
Godliness
Hole
Infinity
Jetsons
Knot
Lost in
Manned
Nebula
Open
Plethora
Quantum
Room
Spool
Tool
Uncrowded
Vacuum
Wasteland/Wonderland
Xyst
Yuri Gagarin
Zero, don't you know how wonderful you are?

The Sweetest Drink

Yesterday morning, she didn’t awaken

Sometime at night, as stars shined
Her final breath left her forsaken

Moonlight bathed the living room, outlined
a fleeting hospice, this snippet in time.
Earth’s incessant crush confines

Yet in death, it slips away, like a dime
through her frail fingers.
We mix life and death in a sublime

porridge over which we linger,
then lick our lips, taste the sweet
prick of death as it malingers

close enough to trap all in complete,
eternal verdict. It snags my arm,
but I do not concede its grasp or retreat.

Death has come for her, it signals no alarm
as it curls and caresses up her form.
It purrs, “Come willingly, there’ll be no harm.”

I watch her aura as she faces the imminent storm
Susurration amongst the clouds, she hears
a bugle’s echoing call as if to inform.

Then walks the path, picking primrose and baby’s tears,
clutching bouquet to her face.
Yet the perfume abates and disappears.

To her lips she presses the loving cup her hand at last has taken. 

Tsarnaev's Blood

I wonder

Who would Jesus kill
If he were the judge today?

It seems Tsarnaev’s life
While worthy enough for
Jesus' sacrifice

Isn’t worthy enough for
Us to preserve

The more I think on it--
Picturing my savior with
Nails pierced through

His hands and his ankles
Allowing his death willingly
For people named Tsarnaev

The more confused I feel
Because by using the death-
Penalty, aren’t we in effect

Saying, Jesus’ death was insufficient

We want not only our Lord’s blood
on our hands, but also the blood

Of Tsarnaev’s? 

Whale Song

There is a whale out there in the ocean who sings at a different pitch than all other whales. No other whales can hear him. Here's my luc bat in honor of the lonely whale.


Whale Song

Let the lonely whale swim
Out on a wave; his hymn, too high
For others to hear. Cry,
Lonely whale. No reply can bounce
Back to you, nor pronounce
Your mating call. No ounce of sound,
Not one whisper, has found
Your heart’s desire. Drowned, your voice,
Is dead. It’s Hobson’s choice.
There will be no rejoicing, no
Fete, no whale-bride to plough
Through the seas so let go and swim.

Twenty Questions for Ego

1. Who gave you your nickname? 2. Does it still fit? 3. How has your identity evolved over the past five years? 4. Do you feel you belong to an identifiable community or do you fly solo? 5. Which caresses your ego more: flattery or affirmation?  6. When was the last time you took a bath? 7. Have you ever foraged for mushrooms? 8. Did you find a Destroying Angel? 9. Did you taste it? 10. In your theology, does grace have meaning? 11. Should it? 12. Why didn’t your parents name you Chris? 13. If your name is Chris, wouldn’t you rather be Gene? 14. How old were you when you spied your first gray hair? 15. If no gray hair yet, when do you anticipate going bald? 16. Do you find life is one impossible question after another? 17. Have you ever free-associated with the word “hinge?” 18. What about free-based? 19. On a jejune note, do your socks match? 20. Why is that?

**************************************

--a prompt from Jim Moore

Rainbow

This is how death looks:
on Earth, a beginning and
an end.
But from the top of the sky,
it's a circle.

Panning for Staurolites

We hunted for Fairy rocks on the Mississippi river bank
today. Water over Blanchard Dam crashed upriver,
cicadas droned in their torpor of late day heat.
My cheeks rosied-up without my straw hat,
and despite our modest success, my son
sat on a jutting rock, marked by indifference.

When a boy nears his 15^th year, indifference
might as well be capitalized. His father, but a bank
and chauffeur, his mother, even less, a son’s
embarrassment. But we paddle forth on this adolescent river
of hormones and hope for the best. Hang on to your hat,
chuckles Grandpa, that boy’s burning heat.

When Grandpa was 15, WWII heated
the air. His parents doffed their different-
sounding German accents, wore their hats
low. At night, Mutti would pull shades, bank
the fire, make the sign of the cross while the river
took her eldest son away to the coast. Her son

vowed to aim low in case the enemy was the son
of her sister still in Berlin. Then lightning heats
the air and Grandpa sighs remembering the river
that took his brother away returned an indifferent
shell of a man who could only put money in the bank,
no treasure in his heart, who kept his hat

on his head when Old Glory waved. His hat
on his head, whispered Mutti, tears for her lost son
who came home from Paris like a 1930’s banker’s
book, closed and beaten, an indifferent
man. Yellow chin of a Blanding’s turtle flashes in the river

next to the rock where my son sits, Upriver,
a cacophony of gulls call; one swoops the hat
off an old man’s head. Hey, he cries, but it is indifferent
to our protestations, all a superfluous chatter, assonance
without meaning. Our feet blue, we seek the heat
of our dry socks and shoes lying on the bank.

Pascal insisted that a river made no difference
On either side of the bank, a man still wears a hat
And a son still grows up to pack heat in wartime

Memphis, Anyway

“I’m not concerned about that now”
said the mountain that spoke with his face,
down from the edge of an unsheltered sky,
and King went to Memphis anyway. Excerpt from Memphis Anyway by Dan Collins


When he was born in 1929, he was named Michael like his father
But concern for the great religious activist compelled his dad
To change both father and son names to Martin,
Martin Luther. Sometimes I wonder if I would accomplish
More if I changed my name, too. Maybe I could be
Eudora Welty or Sally Struthers, but somehow
I don’t think that would make a difference. What compels
A person to rise above their earthly bondage, to lash
Their focus onto ethereal goals, onto Life’s prow
“I’m not concerned about that now”

King made that speech in 1963, the year I was born
And yet in my mind, I can hear his voice pealing out the words
Oh, the wonders of YouTube and a good memory
I still have one, you know. I’ve not lost my mind’s
Facility. Mount Rushmore. I’ve been there twice,
Have you? Once when I was two years old, that place
Was captured on film and I can watch my small, blond
Self holding a snake in Reptile Gardens; it must have
Been along the route. Back then, life was all grace
said the mountain that spoke with his face

Martin was assassinated in 1968, when he was 39 years old
I remember being five then. I owned a dog named Trixie
I had a birthday party with my friends Cheryl and Carol Wold
And Dan Matthews and Jeanne. But I don’t remember any-
Thing about Martin. I wasn’t too young to recall that time in
My life, my grandparents’ farm, my old Aunt Prisca, so why
can’t I remember Martin’s death? Did anyone die when I
was five? I was still living in grace. God still hid in the church
rafters and sang the incantation during High Mass, way up high
down from the edge of an unsheltered sky

The first murder I genuinely remember happened on West 72^nd street.
John Lennon was old then, I was seventeen, he was forty. He was old, right?
Did you know, at the moment he was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital
The song, All My Loving, by the Beatles began playing over the sound system
When I die, I wonder what song will be playing, what song do I want?
I like music from Godspell, the musical. Somehow I’d arrange for Day
By Day to be playing if only in my mind. “To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly, Follow thee more nearly, day by day…”
King knew what his future foretold, but there was a voice he had to obey
and King went to Memphis anyway

Crack Baby

Larry's lips form a circle as he blows
a smoke ring into Keleigh's pasty grey
face. Coughing, she opens the window a crack
to breath in the frosty air. It is winter
although no snow has yet fallen.
Larry's bright eyes dance with a song

playing on the radio. "What the name of that song?"
he says. Kel shrugs, "Give me a puff; quit blowing
dry air at me and give." Her resolve has fallen,
like her grades and her hopes, into a grey
pulp of ashes. She looks out the window into the wintry
sky. She feels as if her heart will crack

like a pumpkin after Halloween, crack
like her voice when she sings a song
that's too high, crack like the first ice in winter
when she steps gingerly on its glass. Blown,
Keleigh has blown her chances. When she's grey-
haired and wrinkled, she'll look back on this fallen

day and ache like a mother bird whose chick has fallen
out of the nest, too young to fly. The shell cracked
but the wings still folded. Its only hope is its grey
plumage to cammoflage it in the dirt. No song
sings from bird's beak or woman's heart. No blowing
winds of hope lift either spirit. It is winter.

Larry hands her the pipe, "Here's your woolie, you winter-
strawberry." Keleigh cradles the pipe, looks at her weightless, fallen
man. Abruptly she wants neither the screw nor the crack. "Blow
it yourself; I don't want your Love," she says with a voice that cracks.
"Bitch," he breathes and turns up the radio. Wainwright sings a song
while strumming his guitar, in his nasal twang, "When it's grey

in L.A., I sure like it that way..." "Effing country, all gloom and grey
music, that sh..." Larry starts, but looks at Kel glowing in winter
white shimmer, winter white glory. Humming a new song.
"What the hell...", but his voice whiskers away, falls
into silence, like snowflakes at night. He cracks
his pipe on the counter, sneers, then takes one more blow.

Each bird sings its own song, flies on its own grey wings.
Battered by the blows of wind and the bitter breath of winter,
the timid become lost. Fallen feathers sift between the cracks.