Poetry by Tara Mie Morisato

Edited by Olivia Mondragon

By cruel accident, the summer

Keels over and we bear witness 

To its scorched underbelly, consequence 

Of the fires it has swallowed to smother.

And should this land breathe green again

In a nonexistent town,

The sprouts will think 

Their world is a creature whose wooden ribs

Lay cracked and sprawled across the earth.

We, however, are strangely gifted 

With the memories from before extinction.

The future will make artisans of us, 

Pile on the cataclysms suffocatingly until

We can only breathe if to tell a story. 

So I will pare down the years 

Fingers tense round a needle

To weave my own strands tightly in.

Minute joints ache til memories manifest, til I

Surrender my world to the terrain of history’s cloth,

And know that some things can never be captured again.

Watch other eyes pore over the picture,

How its topography dissolves

Draped in someone else’s hands.

With only the fiercest contours of time remembered,

It’s all too easy to overlook the basalt cove, 

Where sand dries slowly while the tide recedes, 

Humid sunlight drags sweat down my neck, 

Feet plod through the heat for a splash worth any gem,

And utopia is found in pooled sapphire beyond the brush. 

And down in the water, 

The corals stand in groves of marble, 

Monuments to the vibrancy of an ancient time.

Still, hear how the reef crackles, flush

With countless fine pecks of fish beaks upon rock, 

Or the bubbles and clicks of another unknown creature 

Who we hope will remain noisy in its tapestry of sand.

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Artist Statement: Since this summer, my community has been consumed by the tragedy and political maelstrom following wildfires in Lahaina, despite our homes being an island away in Honolulu. Although I am not from Lahaina and am not Hawaiian, many of us residents across the state felt that this event was more than its literal devastation. It was a symbolic consequence of exploiting the land and water for hotels, golf courses, and other artificial attractions. It is a premonition of our future in the islands as climate change advances. 

I want to convey the bittersweetness of living in this fragile place that people call “paradise”—a place that loses itself the more it is admired. Tourists come and go with the nonchalance of waking from a dream, but I wish to portray that on these islands, there is a continuous world of life, death, and connection. Lastly, in this poem there is reverence for the life that is lost in these events, and the life that survives in the new history. Though my situation is rather specific, I feel that this kind of reflection is applicable to many catastrophes—the world is forever changed, and we are left to make sense of what remains.