After we get done bringing in the cattle, as we were eating lunch, someone mentioned that there was a funeral on the northern part of the island, and we talked about who that person was, who his friends had been, which brought Ryan, the ring-leader of the group of Japanese cowboys that help us out on weekends, to think of another man he had known, a guard at the minimum security prison where they had both worked.
I didn’t get his name, this man who was, in Ryan’s description, “quiet and serious”, who “did things by the book” but if you were straight with him he was a good guy, solid, not one to “talk big and then duck out when things got rough," when a prison fight was brewing for instance and the guards needed to watch each other’s backs. This quiet man, who never married and lived alone, found out that he had brain cancer and one day he spread a blue plastic tarp in his back yard, left a note to the emergency workers apologizing for the mess, and shot himself in the head. Ryan told the story with obvious respect for this man who left the world with the courtesy and resolve of a samurai.
Earlier that morning, we were all waiting in the pasture for the roundup to begin, scattered but within earshot of each other. It was a clear morning in early spring: the mountains were golden and green, the ocean blue and purple, and we could see across the desert to the white billowing smoke of the fire-pit Halema’uma’u. My nephew began to chant in his deep young voice. I didn’t know what his chant meant but it floated through the morning air as naturally as if it had come out of the very rocks around us.
Later I asked my nephew what the chant was called and he said, “I don’t know, it’s just a chant I learned for when we go into class. I was chanting because I saw some petroglyphs there in the rocks.”
We are not a demonstrative, performing sort of family. When my brother and I were growing up singing and dancing were not encouraged; we didn’t even tell a whole lot of jokes. So my nephew’s chant was a small piece of courage. Of making something new.
The root of the word “poetry” is the Greek work “poiesis,” which means “to make”. There is not much more beautiful and valuable in this world, to my mind, than these small, personal, communal offerings of words to each other. I would call that poetry. Here we are, the common people, with our small moments of poetry.
