OK, the next poem.
I'm going to read a poem by Haunani-Kay Trask called
An Agony of Place.
And I miss her, in any case.
She's still around.
I haven't seen her in a long time.
And she's Kanaka Maoli Hawaiian of my generation.
Really known for her scholarship and her activism
as a native Hawaiian, and one of the leaders
of the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement,
and has written monographs and this wonderful book
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty
in Hawaii, and two books of poetry.
So she helped found there at the University of Hawaii
at Manoa the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies.
And the Hawaiian islands, this whole country is occupied.
This was occupied by American businessmen who
saw an opportunity, and they dethroned the Queen.
They took over the islands not that long ago.
And so this is her poem An Agony of Place,
which is considered paradise.
And millions of tourists go there
without knowing anything of the place and the tourism industry,
even though it brings income for the American businessmen.
The land suffers and the people suffer.
An Agony of Place.
"There is always this sense: a wash of Earth.
Rain, palm light falling across ironwood.
Sands fine and blowing to an ancient sea.
I hear them always with fish hooks and nets,
dark long red canoes gliding thoughtlessly to sea.
And the still lush hills of laughter
buried in secret caves, bones of love and ritual
and sacred life.
A place for the manō, the pueo, the 'ōʻō, and the smooth flat
pōhaku for a calabash of stars flung over the Pacific.
And yet, our love suffers with a heritage of beauty
in a land of tears, where our people go
blindly, servants of another race, a culture of machines
grinding vision from the eye, thought in the hand
until a tight silence descends wildly in place."