Hollow reeds bending in any direction the crowd blows,
come to Hawaii – be something you’ve never seen but always known.
People and bones share similar tones, akin in death,
we’ll all sound local when the accents gone.
Prayer sounds like product in motion,
a cure through the Pacific ocean, of palms cut in the winds of hegemonic devotion.
It’s pure emotion,
paradise don’t struggle – the rent comes in waves of promotion.
To hell if we know – maybe if the coastline swallows up the ocean.
The hollow reeds hum what you want to hear – in slow motion.
So I carried this him, forgot its sound,
Grew tall like sugarcane, and got cut back down.
My grandmothers pidgin still hides in my jaw
When I laugh too hard, you can hear it escape through the teeth of my urban patois.
But bleeding blue is easier when red’s been framed as divine repair,
White’s what we were taught to need, Kamehameha’s mistake
mercy for prayer
White sails of Union Jacks waving like our creed hollowed bare,
None for us but all to share.
I’m the logo and the labor – paradise needs a new heir.
In the places the Spaniards taught the Paniolos,
Filipino hands are transgressed in the soil,
Hawaiian hands dressed with oil,
Portuguese tongues prayed through the boil,
mixing sweat with sweet, brown sugar,
a holy broil.
Japanese backs bent neat like pineapple arrows,
Chinese hands never measured by width, but for how narrow.
They found our bones, but were too late for the marrow.
Puerto Rican hearts learned how hunger was sealed,
I am the harvest of what they could not yield.
Swap poi for plastic, kalua for spam,
yet the mortgage demands, I am what I am.
The palms of their labor sung psalms scratched through smoke,
Kalakaua needn’t be poked to be seen, nor seen to have spoke.
His vision stitched my bloodline, dividing the land and eachother.
policy met pulse, the needle knew my color
Hershey’s chocolate blended with melted butter – mixed but never one another
If I pass for something else, will my people still suffer?
Are hollow reeds invasive if they belong to an annexed nation,
Native by blood, foreign by narration?
God made cane, man made separation.
I’ve seen hands pull weeds that look like my relation.
Strange, how we choose what stays by its location.
what if the crop eats the farmer and calls it salvation?
A gift, they call me, Makana, but whose to give?
A nation annexed so another could live.
Do tariffs and taxation mean more when modernity is at ease?
My body is a ledger, my home a lease,
each breath a border, each prayer a piece.
Dreams are drowning brighter than a brown man’s plight.
Drink stout, get gout or get out.
We measure heritage in decimals and grief, like culture on clearance,
belief by lease.
Hawaiian land can’t make a home or house
Fifty percent on your phone
Twenty percent on your blouse
Thirty percent on the dream of being allowed
One-hundred percent on an account
of being too scared to talk and too strong to leave and get out
But if shame is to blame when my back turns against the profane
I’ll leave my people behind and be a color no one can name
And I still hear Hawaiʻi like she’s on the other line
telling me, you left too early to call it mine
I tell her, I never left, I only moved between tides
She laughs, you sound like the tourists do when they cry.
If context changes meaning, and myth fills our mouths,
We needn’t explain tears; accept control when they come out.
