With Grave Irony

With Gravy Irony

An Abstract Web Poetry Exclusive
Words by Dominick Takis // Images by James Charisma

 

The old ways disintegrate like waves in a lost break.

When sand is shipped in

and the coral is swept away.

The floral air

once fragrant and clear

now hangs like vog in the atmosphere.

Acid rains from dark clouds

sewerage stains in Ala Wai ripples

luminescent abstracts from street lamps

replace the moon whose stamps

once brilliantly rested on an ink-black surface.

Now in the rush of heavy traffic

that moves without purpose

always crowding its way into the picture

of nature

castaway in a film-clipped motion

to the currents of a discarded pool.

Father time is a deaf mute

and silence settles no score.

Voices were drowned out

and struggle settled like silt on the ocean floor.

 

You can hear them at times in the blowhole moaning

as if mourning their passing.

Their muffled cries still trapped in the land,

in the gasp of wind

through shattered palace windows

or on the tide-battered rock wall,

who takes down their cryptic scrawl?

Where the waves crawl

and antiquity collapses into the sea,

note with grave irony,

that which was once so powerful,

still can disperse so easily.

A pre-statehood Hawai‘i,

soon to disintegrate into waves of outsiders,

invasive seeds

strangling what was once pristine,

replacing with industry and enterprise

with highways and highrise

greed in its civilized disguise,

native land in a tourniquet tied

in high wires and eyesore telephone towers

that stand out like tumors on the sacred peaks.

There’s plenty of reception

to pose the question,

Does progress hear through the static and speak

of all that cannot be replaced?