Zero Point
a poem from Piko: A Return to the Dreaming
Hello Readers,
I’m busy working with my wonderful editor Norm on my book, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. There is so much work that goes into the creation of a book! I’ve already written at least ten full drafts and re-worked all those drafts multiple times. It’s a constant process of tinkering to find just the right words to be faithful to the experience, and because the book is not a straightforward linear narrative it’s even more important to cultivate clarity while not stripping the book of its poetry.
There are four different narrative streams including personal memoir, present day narrative, poems, and the actual stories I told in the ceremony the book recounts and I hope recreates for the reader.
Today, I’m sharing one of the poems from the book. I chose to break into poetry at certain points in the hopes of creating a continuum between modern readers and poetic traditions of the past that were grounded in the mythic. Hopefully I succeed!
Here’s the poem:
Barefoot in bathing suits,
Marina and I scan for fins—
the dolphin pod coming in
to calm water
after hunting all night
in the starlit ocean.
Hikiau heiau at our backs—
stacked black stones
worn by wind and salt.
Signs say kapu—keep away.
We are haole, foreigners,
but this was always
a sacred place, forbidden
to commoners like us.
Here, the priests once spoke to gods
with blood sacrifice:
Ku, Kāne, Lono, Kanaloa.
The stones are hungry—
you can feel it.
Across the bay
we see the monument
mounted above the reef
where tour boats pull up
to drop off snorkelers,
site of Captain Cook’s murder.
Cook’s men attempted
to kidnap a chief,
Kalani ‘ōpu’u, ali’i nui,
hostage him
for a stolen longboat,
but the people surged to shore,
surrounded the sailors.
Nua’a struck
and Cook went down,
stabbed in the heart
with a knife he had traded
to men who had never seen metal.
First white man to sail into this bay,
but not the last—
his death still reverberates
through the sacred water.
Kapuhakapu,“Forbidden Flower,”
the water is named.
So beautiful, to pluck it
was an affront to the gods,
the bay off limits to all but ali’i.
(And here we are about to jump in
like we have every right to.)
We are ready
to leap off the rocks,
but the water remains unbroken,
an illusion of stability
like skin. Salt
corrodes the bulkhead
and cakes our pores,
merges with inner waters.
We are more fluid than the clay
we were told we are made of.
White spray unfurls in air like ferns.
Mesmerized by the amorphous aqua,
incantation of breaking and reforming,
endless suss and sigh of sea—
Marina sees it first,
summons my gaze to the surf line
with a slow-motion shriek.
Like a bullet
commanding the waves to open
it hurtles toward us on the bulkhead,
flip-turns at our feet,
white belly a lightning bolt
that rattles the ground beneath us,
a radio dropped in a bathtub—
shark!
Electrified and numb
I see its teeth and forget the sight
immediately. “Whoa!”
we proclaim in unison.
Marina says, “That’s at least eight feet.”
I say with little wit, “More, I think.”
What would have happened
if Marina hadn’t been
slow to get going this morning?
That big joint
she lit in the truck
on the way down the mountain
slowed us down
even though I didn’t smoke it.
We decide not to enter
but are back the next day,
crossing the live wire
left by the shark’s passing.
We swim into the azure
where the pod welcomes us
like family. We, too,
must breathe on the surface.
We float,
look up at the pali
where chiefs’ bones
were honored in caves.
Kealakekua, Pathway to the Gods:
Ku, Kāne, Lono, Kanaloa—
I dare to chant their names
knowing sharks sense blood
from miles away.
Today we are bathing
in clicks and whistles
and the pod
drums our cells with sonar,
seeing right through us.
Yesterday’s fears
not even a memory—
we swim in that same water,
closer than ever to freedom.
The story begins
with a shark at our feet.
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love my way of the Light