Sitting on My Roof in Volcano, Hawai’i, Overlooking Kilauea’s Crater and Listening for
Pele in the Silence of Night
by Alexandria Ayaka Hamilton
I climb through the window, palms
flat, careful on the slant
of shingles, slick with leaves,
Pele’s hair glittering
like fine wire in the moonlight,
sharp and dangerous and
beautiful, like the goddess herself.
I thank her for the land I call home.
A moving blanket spreads over the slope. I press
down, listening to the tranquil hush
of the mountain that seems to hold its breath.
The orange glow in the distance.
Not the sun. Pele reminds us
of her presence. The air is thin, resinous
sharp with old woodsmoke,
the burnt sweetness of kiawe.
Yet startlingly clean, as if filtered
through the lungs of the forest. I breathe in
the sting of the cold in my throat,
the ‘awapuhi-sweet trace in the air.
Above me, the sky is unwound silk, dark
and endless; stars pour themselves
into halations that bleed
at the edges, I dream I walk amongst them.
The Milky Way rises
like a cloud, a pale haze I can almost
inhale, faint and ever-present in the night, I lose
myself in its dizzying plumes.
I taste night as iron on my tongue,
feel the blanket’s weave against my skin,
gravity beneath me, pulling me
down, away from the sky.
In San Francisco, the sky feels thinner, its stars
washed-out by apartments and ambition. I imagine
Pele’s slow exhale over Kilauea, the molten
glow she keeps lit in my absence.
Only the coqui frogs measure time on the island. Here, clocks
insist and the dark forgets me. I find
my heart rehearsing its stillness, practicing
the shape of silence I grew up breathing.