Not conventional the thought
Of Kauai as hell on earth,
But it was my thought, no one else's,
And I can tell you what it's about.
One cane-cutter fell asleep in the fields
And got his arm lopped off. So it was
For the plantation slaves, J-town style,
"Mt. Fuji won't take me," but Waimea will.
It was 12-hour days of grim brake-breaking reaping
And he was not one to overexert
For a foreman's crumb in the Capricorn sun,
Not like those Samarais,
Always the fucking Samarai's
Who say "I win ... punk" with a smile,
Who sharpened their blades like they were
Honed to go to battle with the golden sheaves
To achieve the quickest, biggest, most immaculate
Death from green-stained scythes,
Men as relentless as the Japanese can be,
Lords of every painstaked blade of grass
For their fine-toothed frustration, plashing at
The hopelessness of life here, except for
The plantation master's church, the westernest
And he was the kindest one by far, this
Robinson, who gave out guava every Sunday
In his wood community hall, the holy rollers
Among the Japanese as swordy as you can imagine
To get into the good Lord's graces.
No one mentioned his private island, at least to him,
Though he was there, and he did care,
The way a shepherd cares for sheep and goats
Knowing how to fence them, the moment to shear.
He had no use for his mother's zealous
Bloodlet of the local lamb, or for Japan
That stranded him here without escape,
And these islands he wanted consumed in flood.
Yet there were 88 temples on a mountainside shrine
As energized as the Giza Plateau
Where Buddhists climbed, past every variety
Of self as God as message to believe
In the sacredness of every breath, in the ways
Of enlightenment while keeping one eye open
To the suffering of not being allowed emotion
Visits on the pilgrim.
No pilgrimage for him, and no lava god
Of the Lei wave dancers, as far away
As another constellation they are, who pigs drove
Into a frenzy, who carried spears.
They rode atop the waves that attacked the shores relentlessly,
To remind him he was prisoner, and could never
Set foot even on the Forbidden Isle
In his eyes every resentful sunset.
If this was God's Plantation
There was more to the plan than God,
But it couldn't be found here, where people
Glowed in simple sun, with false hopes
Of a better life to come, while, for now,
There's crisply woven tailored suits
Like the shells the ancients used to trade
To feel at home with a forever alien place.
There was a library of psalms, agricultural guides,
No Bob Dylan, not even Izzy K
To guide him to the promised land
At the far end of the field
Where he dared not go, the place of floods
And ceremonial suicides, and night walkers
And black mesquite over the plain that was Mana
Where the ones who thought they were free lived.
Polihale has taken them, as the nearby
Radar tower too soon took him, cursing
On his ice-cold straw death bed
The life he had had to live.
And now, as I point out, the sunsets of Kekaha,
The white ball, source of all information,
And how the trade winds take our minds
With the fronds and grasses to the endlessness of life
And he eventually bent, like a Japanese pine
To let the sun hit his mud-reddened face.
It was all he could do to not go native
And turn his back on the poor human race
And he kinda likes it, with the afternoon raga,
The horses in the fields in 7 ray light
Instead of plodding into town on red, manured roads
Where there was nothing for him at all ...
But now there's papaya smoothies
And the restlessly competitive Japanese have settled
In the same plantation shacks as before,
Which makes him happy,
And he can see the world is really
As he thought it was all along, holding the not-it
Idea in his heart, as I punched his yellow with sweaty
Waiting ticket on the first steamer out of here,
Which turns out to be steerage at 40,000 feet
And passage to Oakland, where they don't scorn the mind,
And all the rules he observed in his youth I will
Also lose, as we part forever friends on different paths.
