Brandy Nālani McDougall is a poet of Kanaka Maoli, Chinese and Scottish descent, born and raised in upcountry Maui. A 1994 graduate of the Kamehameha Schools, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Oregon in 2001 and completed a Fulbright Award to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2002. She is the co-founder and chief editor of Kahuaomānoa Press and is working toward completing her PhD in English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her dissertation focuses on contemporary Kanaka Maoli literature. Her first collection of poetry, The Salt-Wind: Ka Makani Pa‘akai, was published by Kuleana ‘Ōiwi Press in December 2008.
Still half asleep, I drive toward the summit
and find a rhythm turning sharp corners,
leaning with each familiar curve. Outside,
the dark forms of abandoned ‘ahu,
built by some ancestral hand, and high crowns
of silversword stand solemnly in black.
Above them, stars dim, slow as the rented
cars ahead, an uneasy Hertz convoy.
I curse them silently, knowing this road
and the view down of Maui, the muted
flickering of an island city’s lights –
what distracts the rustle of tourist maps.
The fog filters our headlights, as our cars,
imposing on the calm, find their spaces.
In the unlit cold, a voiceless wind waits
for our doors to open, heaters to stop.
I carry blankets up the gazer trail
to the crater’s edge and sit, staring down
a mouth full of blue clouds, a restless tide
covering, then clearing over the black.
Sitting here, above the clouds, I wonder
why I came, what led me to this sacred
place, expecting that it could awaken
the lost beginnings of my blood-answer
my dream of lava touching ocean, belts of steam
blown by the wind, green shoots of fern through rock.
Waking from this dream tonight, cold, restless,
afraid of forgetting where I came from,
I knew only to climb higher, to reach
the summit before sunrise, as Māui-
a-ka-malo did long ago. Lying here
against the cinder, he waited to snare
the sun, its sixteen hurried rays, with reins
of olonā. And I feel the same need
to slow the days, in their constant sway
of golf courses over graves and hotels
over heiau. Each hour soars as quick
as the jets above this child-shaped island
lost in traffic on the highways, the wind-
driven canefields burnt long into the night –
from Pukalani to Kīhei, Kula
to Lāhaina – no rest for paradise.
I close my eyes to listen to the air,
hoping to hear the ancient chants of hā
upwelling from the valleys, the still breath
of life, the inviolate sigh of love
I know lives in iwi beneath me, in rocks
born in the crater, lying where they fell.
But I hear nothing in the wind and clouds,
as the sky turns from black to blue, singing
a silent aubade to the swallowed stars,
to Maui, fading slowly with the moon.
Then, as the sun begins to stretch its rays,
lighting my tears, I remember how words
cannot hold such love flooding the valleys,
the aloha in pink roselani
buds blooming wild, full of new mountain rain.
Below, the clouds thin, and the crater floor
awakens, enrobed in red and gold cinder,
flush of colour woven into the earth.
And the tourists applaud the performance
before walking to their cars, turning back
for one last look at the sun in its house,
another camera’s bright flash. But I stay,
easing off the blanket from my shoulders,
under a sun so close, I could touch it.
And I am grateful for the quiet lull,
for the time to sit among the scattered
grass, the silversword reaching for the sky –
and one lets me watch, opening its fire
in five hundred red flowers, each a sun
offering light from Haleakalā.
A standoff at Nanakuli Beach Park ended today with the loss of a man’s life. After sitting in the stolen car with a gun for six hours, the man, identified by police as 25-year-old David Kalahiki, ran from police toward the water where he took his own life. Kalahiki has spent most of his 20s in prison for burglary and assault convictions.
– Hawai‘i News Register
The black asphalt creases the dry hillside,
sends up its heat in flares, warping the air
around me into a raw kind of fire.
And I stare at it through the cracked windshield
of this beat-up shit of a car I stole
because I knew there was no going back.
They’ll find the dead man and know I killed him.
And soon, they’ll find me here, their lights whirling
mad and their guns pointing back at my own.
With the ocean in the rear-view, I can’t
help but cry into the wheel, hard, broken
tears for my hands, what they will never hold.
I tried, despite their useless stuttering,
their blur of deformed fingers, ugly stubs,
to make myself right, no matter. Even
drawing was too hard, colours crashed, red on
blue, over the paper and on the desk,
then the teacher’s glare, whispers behind me.
I did what I could, waited twenty years
before letting my hands touch a woman
in the dark, where she wouldn’t see my hands
plunge deep into her skirt, trembling as when
I washed dishes at the Red Dragon, cups
and plates breaking into shards as they fell
from my hands, like the dealer man last night,
chest open, so much blood where the bullet
tore his last breath, killed him and his money.
I cry for him now, knowing the mistakes
of my hands, that they can’t blur his blood, nor
my own by this ocean, the same I fished
as a child, the cordage secure, for once,
in my grip. The waves washing salt over
rocks, the quiet glide of my hands guiding
the net in. And the pull outward after
each break, offering love more than mercy,
a faint whisper, This is where you belong.
It must have been hard for him on days
when the sun hit the muddy delta,
sending up what smelled like failure,
rotten and man-made. Still, he drove
his old, rusty car down Pacific to
the college, where he sat by those
half his age who knew little of how
they would begin, how easily beginnings
turn into a thousand dark miles of water.
But they knew school, much more about it
than he did – which words to use when,
how to give nothing but the requirement,
to hide between clauses and commas.
This was his mistake of the essay
called ‘What Life Means to Me’:
My shadow on the ocean’s face, the frayed
water behind a boat. Rainbows and valleys
and leis for my daughters, that they forgive
me for leaving and all that I couldn’t give.
Some nameless face read through it, asking
for predicates, circling fragments, then went on,
knowing our father’s tears, yet deeming them
unremarkable. I can see his hands thumbing
the red-marked page, searching for a glimpse
of understanding and finding none, his face
burning with shame for not knowing how much
it would take to begin again, to go back across
the water. He must have left that day thinking
he had to work even harder for our love, to be
a real father, responsible and clean as grammar.
If you ask the blonde-haired concierge
at the Grand Kīhei, he will tell you
that we ate him whole,
strung his white meat on a stick,
filled his mouth with apples,
and slow-roasted him over fire.
The sunburned vendor selling t-shirts
in Lāhaina will say we ate him, too,
but only certain parts:
the head, heart, hands
wrapped in a kind of spinach
and held over hot lava.
The owner of the Hoola-Hoola Bar
and Grill will say we only ate him
for lack of fine cuisine,
rubbed his skin with sea salt
then boiled him in coconut milk
and served him on a bed of yams.
My anthropology professor, long researching
ancient cultures, will offer explanations
from his latest book:
The white-skinned men seemed gods
to those without metal or written words.
By eating him they meant to become him.
But if you ask my tūtū
while she waters her orchids and protea
she will invite you in
to eat, to eat.
You hold within your heart
enough to fire-stir the night,
along with the possibility
of inamona, the sweet roasting
of your meat in communion
with the pa‘akai – a delicate
offering of heat, light and a full ‘ōpū
of properly seasoned poke.
I know you by your gifts.
Today, I sat under your tangled canopy
of branches and leaned against you,
the shallow ridges of your trunk’s bark
against my cheek. Bright bursts
of clouded sky were being reshaped
by your leaves stroking the wind.
Yours is a subtle, unbending hula
timed by the uneven beat of your many
hard-shelled nuts falling against
the grass, and I thought mostly of how easy
it could be to let go of words like that,
to harvest the dark-shelled secrets
that have bent me under their weight.
Out of her head,
Out of her breast,
Out of her mouth,
Out of her eyes,
Out of her skin,
Out of her breath,
off the length of her body,
offering their piko in return,
Came the soft green curve
of the sun falling into the ocean,
Came the encrusted salt pans,
the cooled fields of pāhoehoe and ‘a‘ā,
Came the first young fern shoots
over the insects who work
unseen and unheard,
Came the stars strewn as seeds
in the heavens, spread by her hands
and sown across the dark soil of space,
Come the offshoots of those long-germinated seeds.