Born in Kailua, Hawai‘i, Chelsea Mana‘olana Duarte is a bachelor’s candidate in English and art at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where she received the Hemingway Award for poetry in 2009. She is part-Hawaiian and expects to receive her first degree in May 2010.
The children were growing up like wild goats
in the field
If they got mad at one parent,
they would take their sleeping mats and stay with other relatives
There is no such thing as ‘aunty’ or ‘uncle’ or ‘cousin’ in this language
There are no lines to delineate biological children from other kin
There is one word, Makua. It means ‘parent’
Everyone is Makua
The children did not grow wild.
I approached the idols which stood upright
on a ridge overlooking an old fishing village.
The strange black surfaces were uncarved,
covered with painted tapers and strips of tapa.
Each had attracted scores of offerings:
fragments of grass, leaves and smaller stones.
A man approached, gathering cords of grass
no doubt intended for worship. I said to him:
I will bring roads and a church through this site.
I then threw down those ancient relics and tore
in pieces the tapers and strips of tapa.
The stones keeled over like black tree stumps.
There are spaces which disappear entirely
when abandoned altogether. Houses
eventually cave in or are bulldozed over
leaving behind disembodied foundations:
cracked floor tiles, copper piping, pock-marked
concrete. Yesterday I saw a man make refuge
in the brush; he tore pages from a book,
laid them over weeds and fell into a deep sleep
with his head on hands cupped comfortably below an ear.
When needed, there are spaces. A home
with walls a landlord could easily pull
by its roots, weed-wack, rake, then discard
with other matters removed from this site.
And then, there is that space Leibniz would agree
would not exist without us. A space
we could not create separate universes for –
it shreds like a fine fabric, until there is only
a single yarn holding two great bodies together,
waving at a distance, flags after a lengthy battle.