Ka wahine `ai honua

The Woman who Devours the Land

I would watch her from my back porch
as she played in the fields.
She danced around my house for seven days
before she took it.

Pele wants something from this land, her
land, Hawai'i, place of the gods, but she
is the only one who never lets anyone forget
that she pours over
the folds of her dress, still
extended fingers, now too stiff to move.
So she sinks back into her hearth, Kilauea,
sneering upon the dense trees
and creeping houses, trying so hard
to race up her mountain. She wants

something from this land. She wants
to let her arms fly out
before her as she sprints
through the rainforest. She
wants to gather cars and front doors
and stop signs in her arms and
tuck them into her pockets. She wants to
tangle her hair into radio antennae, her tears
of frustration still dripping off the ends
of the strands. She wants to dive
into the ocean and feel her skin shredding
so that she may rise into the sky
and fall with rain, and maybe

she took my house, thinking
it would be better as an orange tree,
but I built another house instead.