Arestado

ARESTADO

For Jeffrey, for getting himself arrested while fighting for the right of our people in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 2010

It will go a long way, this.

It is part of a legend now

Going round and round

The circles of our words

The pinnacle of our stories

As they become old histories

Wrought in cold stone tablets

And these blue, peaceful waters

Making our life liquid and eternal.

You could have shown your pulse

And how it beats about the hard labor

In there, beating past the train

Of rage going fast and faster

As this gets into the blood of our fathers

Mothers, sisters, children, brothers,

All of them who have remained quiet

In fear as in trembling before the peace

That is yet to be theirs. Did you have

The police people staring at you with the looks

Of kindness, saying without the syllable,

That to get arrested is to go through

The way of the Diamond Head breeze,

Free and forever

In the margins of the Pali mountain fastnesses

In the fringes of sugarcane fields

We no longer dare touch

Because there, to say what needs to be said,

Is to sin again and again

Is to fall from grace one more time?

Ah, give that body to the warden.

Ah, gift our people with the spirit

Of your desire, this freedom we are about

To lose if we did not know where the entrances

Of prisons are.

Aug 10/10