1
Where have the voices gone that years ago
Gave us courage to trust,
Though the wind sickle the precipice
And birds scream in the wilderness of air?
Whatever in our lives brought us to this raked ledge
Can drive us into the black folds of water beneath us
Afraid, unless we can find once more the word
Which, under the massed weight of the elements, seems gone.
2
The sun fails.
Rayed with four hundred golden oars
It pulls back
Till it leans on the ravenous blue of heaven,
And the ocean floods over its fire.
It sinks forward.
The sounds we are trying to hear are drowned.
3
Ka'ena: the sea.
Brine of origin stands in these pools
Burning in gold sunfall.
Bright rain has filled them.
And what rain has spilled past clefts in coastal rock.
4
Ka'ena: the hooked wings of the cliff.
They tilt sheer to the stretch of stones and baking dirt
That scrape the bird's wild throat
Tasting of dust.
Against that gray reach of wings
Banked black rock and red rock rise from the ocean naked
In an ignorant rim.
Bruised by the white waves of years,
They've grown stupid with long standing.
Reared in another age, they stay,
Counter to flight.
The cliff swerves above, pitching down through blue air
To the verge of the sea,
The surf pours forward,
And, under green walls of water, the rocks endure.
5
At Ka'ena in the night when the birds are still
And their cries,
And the ocean at low tide pulls down the coastline
,As if half asleep,
Sometimes there are strains like songs, voice
Praising the old ways,
Ghosts of those who ran forward to the other world
Exultant,
Chanting on the path as night avalanched behind them
Casting rocks.
They believed the wings of the great bird who brooded on the ocean
When the world began
Would bear them up: they would not become dust and nothing.
They plunged into death's unfathomable water
Trusting the mystery;
.The power of their lives still tells us of them.
6
We are of our own age.
The names we give to things are not the same
As the names they gave.
We may not at first understand.
Yet the sea is as it was. The rocks have not changed.
By faith the living presences remain,
And far beneath the forward-thundering surf
In the silence the world is founded on,
Abides alone the Everlasting Word.