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There was no history in your village, as there wasn’t in mine,
Until the day a B-17 circled over us, turning at Laie Point,
And forgoing the water-landing in the lagoon by the Beauty Hole,
Clipping the Cook pines by hole No. 9 and the Filipino graves,
To land, big as a green-brown whale, on Kahuku Golf Course.
It was a miracle like ice for you, a hole in reality a gypsy brought
So that you could stick your finger into it, rip it large, and see
What might be the future that had only you and your forgetfulness
As the past from which to derive its phantasms of pain and glory.
We, on the other hand, though mesmerized as you, wanted for nothing
Except story—a window like a pathway to the world beyond us—
For we could already see we were surrounded by the aquamarine of seas,
Our world a deathlessness between the splashes of wave and wind.
And so we ran down our dirt Jeep roads, across dunes piled by the shore,
Betweens stones marking the collected dead of our kumpadres in the
canefields,
And onto the stubbly greens of what we’d made for our leisure joy—
A nine-hole set of golf links set beside the sea on sandy ground.