But the bees appease Polihale
With necromantic current
Of the dead under the lead of
Mesquite and mimosa, grieving widows
Of the desert, their black bean fingers
Shiver their alms.
Brown shroud vines
Pulse with the life of the dead,
While grass pom poms lift to the sky
And black stones hold the fire
That was life.
The wind brings in more dead
Every moment.
They seem content
To stay invisible, only heard
In the deafening surf
Here at the end of the line
Where our souls, they say,
Go to leap.
How many times have we played this game?
How many rounds do we get?
The sky is blue. The leap is free.
White berries adorn the path.
We constantly die, for the joy of rebirth
Here, to swells of loudest silence from Niihau,
And the wind wants so much to speak
It scatters sand like scouring salts
To rouse the dead, laundry sheet ghosts
Ready to blow fresh again.
And every dry
Grass blade screams to be heard
A silent cry
Of what it feels, and so becomes
But other silences crowd it out
And we, singers of many songs,
Can only play it by heart,
The urge to kiss,
To join, to merge the two into one,
Death and birth
And the journey in between, planting with lips
The seeds of healing
Where the heart chakra opens.
By way of explaining, the Great Poet exclaims:
"Can you hear the Art of the Ocean?
Can you feel the mist in the sand?
Can you see the giants roam the mountains
Standing guard
And allow the call of oneness
To embrace
All spirit as divine? The love of the holy mother
Flows through your heart."
Yet instantly the cloud
And the waves on the sand
Match
To remind us of patterns
We are already forgetting,
The ones where the heart closes in
On form
And sends a cockleburr flower to the heavens,
Which never accepts
What is not ours to give.
No beginnings, no end
That's why there is the kiss,
For the serpentine sperm in the sand
Til the island maiden herself
Cracks the veil of her hips
And swallows who would leap
Volcano skies.
It was love, after all, the ritual, the sought whole
And a kiss that could last forever,
Like every bating breath of shore
That shatters like commencement glass to lace.
Malama Polihale
