The stream is dry where the past drowns.
From the banks of the periphery
you see the evidence of drought,
sunken souls singing out
from the hollows and the bellows,
from what once bubbled and rolled
into an expanding perception.
From these narrow glimpses
and desperate attempts at control,
the waters flowed, drunk enough to know
the inner workings of letting go.
The fading lines,
there is no one place where this is told.
The valley’s scarred relief
replayed
through sensory expressions
and psychic impressions.
Stepping outside of time
to get a sense of it going by,
marking our places with
what has slipped away.
Beneath darkened leaves
dormant streams rise to a boil.
Dragging with them the bloody soil,
the dislodged once royal stronghold
falling into a mud slide of being sold.
With every year the past drowns a little more.
You’ll see the disappearing crown land,
the desperate hands
clutching the old ways
to hold off and to withstand
the flood tide of change.
Journeying out the way we came,
access diverted, mauka streams defiled,
land tied in military wire.
Under the glass of sprouting cities,
the high rises higher
until far from sight and mind,
the wai ola slips into disorder .
Without its source , the illusion of pure water
crawling over its course
becomes scraped knees on dry beds,
divorced, torn to shreds.
Knowing not which way is up or down,
we find new ways to drown.
In the annals of progress,
under monuments of ownership ,
crushed beneath metal gates
private signs and moral claims,
The crooked lines are what remains.
Upon this land the insatiable hands
have stamped their imprints.
Their words
certify the abuse,
meandering in circles of misuse,
in lies and lonely streams
that flow through
like a tightened noose
of shadow and loose stone.
yakskinpocketnotes 