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Ka'ena Point
by Phyllis Hoge Thompson

  1   Ka'ena

What cried?
We slept in the ocean of God.
God kept us.
While the names for things were still fish
Flashing dark and quick in the same water,
Before us,
There was no net or hook,
No gold or silver catch.

For the bird alighing
These reefs were
Heaved from the starless water-waste to
Cry of what nothing heard,
Original,
The making word.

Before us
The pulse of love desolated the valley cupped
Under God's wrist
Ka'ena
Where the long waters that shudder from the South
Slam what breakers can hurdle the west rocks
And smash blue into the bright sky.

   2.   Creation

To call quiet upon earth
Wide as God
The valley lay given where the sea fell
To suffer love's heaviness
And be filled with the sea's leaving
Gave
Where the sea pulled back
Fathoms of need
The grave word
Sounding all things lost and made
In the deep whelming.

   3.   Maui

It was haggard Man
Stood at Ka'ena and cast for the islands.
He dragged them out of ocean on the black hook
His hands had worked.
Weeping with more than labor
He grappled them,
And they came hard to where they are
For us
Tears on his full swart face
That these islands are all he could give us
And the sun snagged in his net,
That we need more.

   4.   What We Lost

That we need what we lost when we were called from the slow sea-
Abiding peace, like the slopes of world floor
Under us,
And the unknown rim of the deep surely believed in,
And the unconditional vast surrounding ocean
Holding us,
Place of all names
Unsounded
Where we were one

   5.   Ka'ena Point

Salt murderous water.
Anyone can get killed finding the gutted road
To Ka'ena Point.
You have to be mad to go out there
Past every safety
To take in your eyes the brilliantly colliding surges
Of water and racked light
As they catch on the lonely ridges of the coast.

Thundering ocean walls against the Point
From West and South
Hurling to those who go out far enough
To find the edges
The radiance of that dark other we came from.

It is the lost sea-silence of love.
Look there! The bright spray faltering!


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