In partnership with the Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival, UH Better Tomorrow Speakers Series will welcome US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, along with No`u Revilla, Lehua M. Taitano, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt, to read their poems published in Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry. The will be moderated by Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru author and Professor of English at UH Mānoa.
This live event will happen on October 23rd, 2021, at 3:30 PM (HST). Lead sponsors include the Hawaii Book and Music Festival and the Halekulani Hotel.
The following are the poems from Living Nations, Living Words that that will be read by their authors on Saturday:
Joy Harjo
EXILE OF MEMORY
Do not return,
we were warned by one who knows things
You will only upset the dead.
They will emerge from the spiral of little houses
Lined up in the furrows of marrow
And walk the land.
There will be no place in memory
For what they see
The highways, the houses, the stores of interlopers
Perched over the blood fields
Where the dead last stood.
…
SHAPESHIFTERS BANNED, CENSORED, OR OTHERWISE SHIT-LISTED, AKA CHOSEN FAMILY POEM
The one whose maʻi was stolen as she slept.
The one who sold everything to live as bite marks.
The one named Mai, Mai, E ʻAi.
The one raising his scalp like foil from a pan of meat. You know how many pigs I’ve killed, he asks. And when he says kill he means it affectionately. Not I killed pigs to feed my blood but I slept with pigs, my arms hooked around them. When you love what you kill.
The one who thinks he knows who stole the maʻi. The one with ʻōʻō feathers instead of hair. The years it took to catch each bird and adorn her head in yellow.
…
CURRENT, I
The conventionalsymbol for current is I, (I) originating from the French intensité de courant, an intensity of electrical flow measured as a quantity per unit of time.
Consider: we are made almost entirely of water and electricity.
So our vernacular
of emotion employs surge
wave spark,
impulse and current,
the flood of salt
or rush of crackling,
blue pulse, of
arcing rivulet.
…
THIS ISLAND ON WHICH I LOVE YOU
And when, on this island on which
I love you, there is only so much land
to drive on, a few hours to encircle
in entirety, and the best of our lands
are touristed,
the beaches foam-laced
with rainbowing suntan oil,
the mountains tattooed with asphalt,
pocked by telescoped domes,
…
Read “This Island on which I Love You” on the Library of Congress website.
NA WAI EĀ, THE FREED WATERS
A Story of the People
of Ko`olau Moku, Maui Hik ina
- Mahi`ai Kalo, Taro Farmer
All his life loving earth
a living harrow waist deep in mud
planting tilling trenching shoveling plowing
mud to field, gravel to path, stones to bank
yoked no less than animal to plow
a year of this then huki `ai, harvest
shouldering the heavy bags
heaving lifting hauling slogging
through acres of taro fields
ancient footpaths fragile `auwai wetlands
Read “Na Wai Eā, The Freed Waters” on the Library of Congress website.
