by Terra Oliveira
four & a half million people
visit the island of O`ahu
per year, watch the red sun
climb down into the Pacific,
escape into paradise, laugh
with the water
as petroleum from Red Hill
leaks under the island,
into the drinking water,
the haoles drinking their mai tai’s
on 382,000 acres of tropical heaven
we belong to the `āina
by the right of our own Kingdom,
& a fifth of the land “belongs to”
+++++++++++++(is owned by)
the military, the U.S. navy’s tanks
bleeding into the aquifer
that the residents of Honolulu
depend on
the honu & I exchange visits
in the stillness of the hazy sea,
& the O`ahu Water Protectors
cry out — ola i ka wai,
water is life — on this eden of earth,
demanding the Red Hill Storage Facility’s
immediate & permanent ending
the sun waits
to climb back up
again, to shine victoriously
through the waves
Terra Oliveira is a writer and visual artist from the San Francisco Bay Area, a bookstore manager, and the founding editor of Recenter Press. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Protean Magazine, Hooligan Magazine, and elsewhere, and they were the Artist-in-Residence at the Schoolhouse at Mutianyu at the Great Wall in March 2017. Their ancestral lineages come from the Azores, the Hawaiian islands, Southern China, and throughout Eurasia.
Hawaii Pacific Review 