Heartland Poems-7

Tender Mercies


I look at you, heartland dear,
from this thought. You are a
landscape of drought
and parched fields,
home to blood martyrs
dying for what death can offer
to those who desire to dream,
or remember all that can be
remembered. I ought to come
and visit you once again,
say the prayer for the saint
that gives abundant rains
so the seeding of the soil
can begin.

You are the amorphous light,
in between the Manoa
clouds of white fluffiness
and the dense mountaintop,
rich with its promise
of a cold night. You tease me
in this yearning, like the rain
thirsting for the earth,
or the dying sun for the stillness
of an alien's sleep. How could I
have run away from you,
and speak in a language
whose phrases are of pain
and sorrow? No, this thought
grips me so, keeps me beholden
to the sentence of quitting you.
Heartland dear, there will be
no return. At your airports,
I now fall in line
in the stranger’s queue, like one
thief sneaking into your inner room,
and there leaves his shadow
underneath the sheets
that smells of regrets,
the scent a trespasser’s grief.

Waipahu/
Jan 12, 2012