Hawai'i '89

The way it is now few streams still flow through lo'i kalo to the sea. Most of the water where we live runs in ditches alongside the graves of Chinese bones where the same crop has burned in the fields for the last one hundred years.

On another island, a friend whose father was born in a pili grass hale in Kahakuloa, bought a house on a concrete pad in Hawai'i Kai. For two hundred thousand he got window frames out of joint and towel racks hung crooked on the walls.

He's one of the lucky ones. People are sleeping in cars or rolled up in mats on beaches, while the lū'au show hostess invites the roomful of visitors to step back in time to when gods and goddesses walked the earth. I wonder what she's talking about.

All night, Kānehekili flashes in the sky and Moanonuikalehua changes from a beautiful woman into a lehua tree at the sound of the pahu.

It's true that the man who swam with the sharks and kept them away from the nets full of fish by feeding them limu kala is gone, but we're still here like the fragrant white koki'o blooming on the long branch like the hairy leafed nehe clinging to the dry pu'u like the moon high over Ha'ikū lighting the way home.

— When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through by Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, Jennifer Elise Foerster (Page 210)