The stream is dry where the past drowns

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.

Where Words go Unspoken

The old timers say it is not breaking the same.

Out there beyond the shipped in sand,

waves peel like a sticker

off a fake ocean

in a Waikiki gift shop postcard

framing sunsets between idyllic palm trees.

Beyond the manufactured images that sell vacations,

stalk the cranes

chipping away at what remains of undeveloped land.

Their insatiable beaks bent on destruction

then reconstruction,

they’re omnipresent ushers only to obstruction.

In the pretentious lobbies of plastic hotels

you hear the glass chatter of conversations going nowhere,

much like the valley roads

sought to drown out the city lights

running red through the clay

like swollen drains where flash floods bled,

where a Ko’olau shadow is lifting

from the trees like a fingerprint.

It has all the markings of a familiar hand

tracing the deepest recesses

where words go unspoken.

A chronicle of breath

as it trembles the glistening webs

between thickets of bamboo branches,

a wind instrument in motion,

in nearly choreographed dances

amongst the rain chaos that creases the fabric

of the forest’s malo folding in on itself.

Storms consume the once visible trails

where signs of struggle and uprooting

reveal partial conclusions to the dissolution,

the rest of the story is unspoken,

like the cold silence in a tragedy

slow to reveal that no one wishes to remember

but still can feel the tremors of violence

as clouds pause timeless

bound to Tantalus.

Coming from behind

the illuminated eyes of a dark profile,

morning brings a treason of light

to shatter the night like a verdict,

reverberating through the injustice,

through all the darkness enclosed in files,

filling up cabinets and dusty shelves,

unresolved in our selves

as we prop up the much larger abyss

with a loss of innocence.

 

 

Night Came to Reamore Part 1

Night came to Reamore in November of 58

followed by Gardai, reporters and uniformed officers in galoshes.

They were searching the bogs for a missing man.

A cap was found at a stream bottom, a broken staff,

a flashlamp buried in a turnip field.

All through the mud of those relentless days

of winter weather they combed the countryside

leaving no stone unturned

When it finally dried out,

Moss Moore’s body was found strewn in a ravine,

face down in sodden clothing,

it was a tragic scene

for a gallery of onlookers

who had gathered along the edges

as investigators flashed their cameras,

you could see on their faces

a look of wonder mixed with horror

as one of their own was plucked like turf from the land.

By nightfall the rumor mill was running through Reamore,

a rural and isolated corner of County Kerry

that will be forever associated with this murder

and steeped in its infamy.

Every ravine is carved by its own history.

In every field there’s the story behind the story.

In the quiet bogs where neighbors cut peat for each other,

sometimes blood trickles amid the brooks that separate land.

Among those elements, both natural and man made, that divide people,

there is something primitive in upholding these boundaries of land.

In these layered hills of stove smoke and misty light,

sweat and pride is enclosed by stone walls

and tied like wire to the divider lines,

something men claim as their own

driven like a stake,

their own bones

running deep into the muddy ground.

It may seem nondescript,

this particularly narrow strip of preserve

but contained in it was a powerful urge,

the capacity to take another man’s life.

They say Dan Foley killed Moss Moore

that winter’s night in Reamore.

He had always maintained his innocence,

despite the obvious signs of struggle

scratched into his face,

one thing’s for sure, whoever killed Moss Moore

did so with his bare hands.

Judgement passed the lips of the locals,

demanding Foley to stand guilty,

despite the fact that they were neighbors and friends.

The men couldn’t have been more different,

Moss was small and wiry with sharp and pointed features,

a solitary man who lived alone with his two dogs.

Foley was a family man, large in stature,

square jawed with serious eyes under a flat cap.

Their dispute over land was well known in that farming community.

Their homes were divided by a ditch,

the first tragic stitch

that was lain in the absence of a divider wall

that was meant to be built but never was.

Instead, Moore constructed a makeshift fence

to keep Foley’s cows from drifting in and out,

the intention of any temporary boundary

but this one only welcomed in distrust and doubt.

Disagreement over a half-acre strip of land created a rift

and a tension arose between the men like a mist

swirling in rumor, whatever happened that night

would leave no witness.

Murder sometimes leaves a mark in the isolated dark

but few can see it,

one man’s final breath

can be squeezed from him forcefully

but not everyone can pick up the echoes

of his death throes in the rural quiet.

To be continued…