POSTCARD FROM KAILUA-KONA
Dears,
Our friends here live in a made oasis at the ocean
edge of a 200-year-old lava flow. The lava’s crunchy
& bunched in swells. Some tough Kiawe trees (their
feathery leaves, their long, hard thorns) poke up from
some undersoil—that’s all. We ate in a beachside bar
near sea turtles napping on stones, while a pink,
rabbit-shaped cloud swallowed the setting sun.
Earlier, that massage! It ended with a “pule,” and I
tell you God was in prayer, here where God is still
completely absorbed in creation, busy staying
ahead of us.
Photo by Paulius Dragunasvia Unsplash.com (CC–0)
—from Rattle #68, Summer 2020
Tribute to Postcard Poems
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Donna Henderson: “I love the formal constraint that the space of a postcard provides, for the pressure it puts on language to vividly evoke an experience or impression with the barest of details. In this poem, the insight of the last line arrived in the moment of writing it, as though the pressure of the form itself had squeezed it out from underground.” (web)
