Dirge for a Hawaiian crow
The scientists have a bloodlust on them
as merciless as hunters —
They tagged your fragile claws
and caged you, for your own good,
far away from your forests
(160 characters incl. spaces)
#micropoetry
Hawaii
The vacant lover
This empty house is aching
with loneliness for you
The sofa sags, the windows
are crusted with dirt —
and you are not here
to see the ginger flowers bloom
(159 characters incl. spaces)
#micropoetry #veryshortstory
Waking the birds
Your radiance
in the early dawn hours,
when sunlight touches the banyan tree,
brings the shy forest birds down
from their trees
looking for you.
(160 characters incl. spaces)
#micropoetry
Looking for work
Carrying his bucket,
looking for work, he
trudged from
Punchbowl to Waikiki
every day on
thick calloused feet,
and scribbled poems
in his book
at night
(158 characters incl. spaces)
#micropoetry
White ship waiting
He sees a tall-masted wooden ship
In Honolulu Harbor
It sits there, crewless, silent,
bobbing with the waves.
And my father thinks
It is there for him.
(154 characters incl. spaces)
#micropoetry
He remembers
My father remembers ancient Banyan trees
He sees ghosts in the tall temple grass,
smells rain on old sugar cane fields
He watches the ocean
and waits
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#micropoetry
Beneath our feet
They mean us no harm,
the grasses whisper, as our
boots trample their slender stalks.
We have nested their birds, we have
covered their ancestors’ bones.
(154 characters incl. spaces)
For Hawaiian coral reefs dying from a molasses spill
When you no longer know the splendor of waves
washing your brilliant blues reds corals,
when the fish follow you into oblivion, then
know that we allowed this.
(160 characters incl. spaces)
Presumed extinct
No other place on Earth
has known such mass extinction
of birds as these Hawaiian Islands
They are catalogued in museums,
but absent from the forests.
(156 characters incl. spaces)