Poetry

  • October, Yellowstone Park

    How happy the animals seem just now, all reading the sweetgrass text, heads down in the great yellow-green sea of the high plains— antelope, bison, the bull elk and his cows moving commingled in little clumps, the bull elk bugling from time to time his rusty screech but not yet in rut, the females not…

  • Mauna Loa at 7,000 Feet

    In the last grove of ohia, mamane, and gray-green koa at the top of the Mauna Loa Strip Road, we met a ranger coming down. He had been hunting a feral goat that had broken through the fence. Such animals destroy the forest understory and native plants, and spread weeds that drive out the more…

  • Captain Cook

    1. The Hero He travels on impulse like oceans, thinks nothing of survival. Is one body. Keeps a log. “Dangers fly back and forth over us, sometimes descend.” His job is to keep the ship whole, keep it from scattering the waves. To hold onto the cargo, increase it. 2. Travel The ship's christened Resolution…

  • ‘Ama’u

    These thorny ferns are what Kama-pua‘a, the Pig God, looked like when he wished to disguise himself. When he took this form, he had no visible eyes but he could see, no nostrils but he could smell, no bristles but he could feel every sulfur wind that touched his reddish fronds. He looked exactly like…

  • Kamuela

    That great acacia's not growing anymore, the rats are on the limbs, the heartwood diseased, the fallen leaves show rot has replaced the long-lived green, like an emotion that cannot be recalled sufficiently. Yet it stands where it's always been, where the incredible horses graze. They seem never ridden, serene there, only combed and released…