[ode to the water beneath Kapūkakī also known as Red Hill]
“How ashamed water is to be what you have made it.”
—Conchitina Cruz
this week i was becoming it was the eve of a storm i was forming
into fluid preparing to change state or nation into occupied
land over a crime scene a body of water not over a woman but
oceanic in that way. now i’m new here & no genius but even
i know water is life; what is the harvest of a tank farm? what
grows? nobody deserves this, not even the random ate in
waipahu who told me why can’t you just get over martial
law as if we could have even gotten to find his body or an
ordinary grief. even servants of empire can be my kapwa.
what is a colony against that? what if i got a bottle of pinatubo
water shipped here the same wai that along with lava rushed
down our mountain in grey torrents to turn one US base into
a ruin the other evacuated, tails between its legs? what
if i offered that water to this land in places, bit by
bit, to say: you’re not alone. keep fighting
Copyright © 2024 by Jake Eduardo Vermaas. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Written soon after my first intense Kona Low weather event after moving to Hawaiʻi back in 2021, this poem attempts to engage with the shared spaces of grief and water, how to be a good guest, and how the cancer of militarism that poisoned my Kapampangan homeland did the same to Red Hill and Kahoʻolawe, and the common threads we struggle against. It thinks about the Filipino concept of kapwa, that is, ‘shared common self’ or ‘shared space’; how the roots of the word ode relate to the Greek aidein, or ‘to sing,’ and how there can be joy in solidarity.”
—Jake Eduardo Vermaas
Jake Eduardo Vermaas
