Acknowledgements
Thank you to all the poets, students, teachers, school administrations, families, friends, colleagues, and sponsors who contributed their time, money, blood, sweat, tears, and effort into making the Hawaiʻi State Youth Poet Laureate Program a reality. Thank you to Art Vento and everyone at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center (MACC) for recognizing the next generation of artists and empowering Hawaiʻi’s young people. In particular, we want to thank Dr. Moira Pirsch, Stacey Gonsalves, Aleah Makuakāne and everyone else at the MACC Education Department — without your work, none of this would have been possible. Thank you to Joy Harjo, kumu Dr. Brandy Nālani McDougall, Terisa Siagatonu, Meera Dasgupta, Dr. Camea Davis, Travis Kaululāʻau Thompson, Ittai Wong, William Nuʻutupu Giles, Dr. Lyz Soto, Lua Bowman, Kalehua
Fung, Urban Word NYC, Kuumba Lynx, and Edith Middleton. Each of you have helped encourage young poets to share their reflections on the past and their dreams for the future of this world.
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“The arts are education. They stretch you as a human being, lift up the human spirit, and help us become better people.”
- Pundy Yokouchi Founding Chairman, Maui Arts & Cultural Center
– from the poem “Oral Traditions“ (2015)
by Travis Kaululāʻau Thompson & William Nuʻutupu Giles
For over three and half millennia, the Pacific Islanders of Oceania spoke without alphabet or written language, retaining all knowledge and history through the shaping of spoken word into muscle memory. In ancient Polynesia, children with the best memory skills were chosen to be the culture keepers; story-tellers, handpicked to be poets. Weaving today’s events into yesterday’s lore, they practiced immortality in breath and added generations to the genealogy. In Hawai‘i, these youth poets were apprenticed through their adolescence and early adulthood to become kākāʻōlelo — a special class of orator kahu trained to serve as the research arm and mouthpiece of nā aliʻi. As working members of the royal court
and privy council, these kākāʻōlelo doubled not only as walking talking catalogs of indexed knowledge and history, but also as the primary orators of the chiefly class. During the reign of the Kamehameha dynasty, several of these kākāʻōlelo went on to become prominent community leaders, politicians, teachers, historians, authors, and scholars. Many of the first Kanaka ʻŌiwi who had their prolific works published in print media via the Hawai‘ian nūpepa were once young kahu chosen and trained to serve aupuni as kākāʻōlelo.
In many ways, Hawaiʻiʻs contemporary youth poet laureates are asked to serve their communities in much the same role: as chosen and trained orators serving as the voice of the people they represent. This is
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“An ocean erases all that is written in sand, so our ancestors etched everything into the tides of their tongues.”
Introduction
why Travis Kaululāʻau Thompson, the Maui Arts & Cultural Centerʻs Hawaiʻi Youth Poet Laureate Program Coordinator, makes it a point to remind prospective youth poets of the kuleana attached to the title of Hawaiʻi Youth Poet Laureate.
In this, the only homeland of Kānaka ʻŌiwi, it is crucially important that native Hawai‘ian oral traditions are remembered, honored, and practiced with reverence and respect. Mahalo.
people from all the major islands have submitted their poetry for a chance at the annual title.
In words there is life, in words there is death.
In early 2021, The Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s (MACC) Education Department began offering free online youth poetry workshops in anticipation of its inaugural search to find Hawaiʻi’s first official State Youth Poet Laureate (YPL).
Since then, hundreds of young
Hawaiʻi Youth Poet Laureates travel around the state providing community outreach, visiting schools and performing their poetry as active representatives of the MACC’s YPL Program. The goal of the program is to celebrate Hawaiʻi’s top youth poets who are committed to artistic excellence, civic engagement, and social impact. This book is a continuation of the Program’s celebration of youth voices. Featured within these pages are a collection of twentyfive poems written by twentytwo poets as young as eleven to seventy-one years old. Eighteen of those twenty-two poets were named as Hawai‘i YPL finalists, and two of them are our previous Hawaiʻi YPLs: Lua Bowman (2021), a graduate of Punahou
School, and Kalehua Fung (2022), a graduate of Halau Kū Māna Hawai‘ian Public Charter School. Also included are poems and messages from key supporters of the project. They are:
Joy Harjo of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma. She is the twenty-third US National Poet Laureate, and is an awardwinning author, musician, artist, educator, and activist. Joy was the keynote speaker at our 2021 closing awards ceremony via video.
Brandy Nālani McDougall PhD, from Kula, Maui. She is Hawai‘i’s second official State Poet Laureate (2023-2025) and is an award-winning author, educator, activist, and independent publisher. An Associate Professor teaching Indigenous Studies
at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Brandy was our 2022
keynote speaker at the ceremony in Kahului.
Meera Dasgupta, from New York City, is the 2020 National Youth Poet Laureate and is distinguished as both the youngest author at age sixteen and the first Asian American to win the title. Meera is a fierce advocate for student voice, gender equality, climate issues, and social justice.
Terisa Siagatonu, from the San Francisco Bay Area, is an awardwinning spoken word poet, arts educator, and community organizer. Terisa is a mental health care provider, youth advocate, activist for Indigenous rights, climate advocate, and LGBTQIA rights.
The Hawai‘i Youth Poet Laureate Program is an initiative of the MACC – the largest and oldest performing arts center in the
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“I KA ʻŌLELO NO KE OLA, I KA ʻŌLELO NO KA MAKE.”
Pacific Region of the world – in collaboration with local schools, arts and humanities organizations, including the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities and the Maui County Economic Development Office, among others. National partners include Urban Word, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Coalition, the Library of Congress, the National Parks Service, and the Kennedy Center.
Editors, Travis Kaululā‘au Thompson
Lyz Soto, PhD
Moira Pirsch, PhD Maria Kanai, professional copy editor
*Note: The names, ages, or grade levels of the youth poets listed within is a reflection of when they were named as Finalists, or when their poem(s) were selected for publishing.*
2021-2022
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Poems & Supporting Messages HAWAIʻI STATE POET LAUREATE
Greetings, I’m Joy Harjo, the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate. I am here, very present, and here to honor the Hawai‘i Youth Poet Laureate program. I want to start with an excerpt from a poem I wrote for a granddaughter who was coming of age. As young poets, you are becoming, you will be coming, as young people who are discovering the power, the magic, of what poetry can do. What it can carry. You are a part of a long tradition that goes way back through many ancestral lines, and because of that, I want to read this to you. Because I think of you all as coming of age, as young poets. It’s from “For a Girl Becoming” (2009).
FOR A GIRL BECOMING
Did you hear us, as you traveled from your rainbow house?
We called you with thunder, with singing. Did you see us as we gathered in the town beneath the mountains ? We were dressed in concern and happiness. We were overwhelmed as you moved through the weft of your mother even before you took your first breath, your eyes blinked wide open. Now breathe and when you breathe remember the source of the gift of all breathing. And when you walk remember the source of the gift of all walking. And when you run remember the source of the gift of all running.
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23RD U.S. POET LAUREATE
Joy Harjo
And when you laugh remember the source of the gift of all laughter. And when you cry remember the source of the gift of all tears. And when you dream remember the source of the gift of all dreaming. And when your heart is broken remember the source of the gift of all breaking. And when your heart is put back together remember the source of all putting back together.
Don’t forget how you started your journey from that rainbow house.
How you traveled, and will travel through the mountains and valleys of human tests. There are treacherous places along the way. But you can come to us.
There are lakes of tears shimmering sadly there, but you can come to us, and valleys without horses or kindness but you can come to us, and angry jealous gods and wayward humans who will hurt you but you can come to us you will fall, but you will get back up again because you are one of us.
I read that segment because you are at the beginning (or middle) of a journey of poetry and discovery and of becoming a fully realized human being, as someone who came to this time, to this generation, to this beautiful place you live in. And you’re carrying so many gifts: gifts of perception, gifts of music, gifts of science, of language, all kinds of gifts. Don’t ever forget that. Poetry helps you remember. If you get to a place where you feel lost or despondent, or you wonder how you’re going to make it through, or it’s too painful, or even too happy — you can find poetry. Poetry will find you, in writing and mystery. Poetry will help you find solace, to find beauty, to find out what your little brother or sister is thinking. Poetry has many uses.
I’m going to read another poem for you, called “Remember.” I was asked to write this poem not long after I started writing poetry. You guys are lucky that you started writing poetry when you were relatively young, as I didn’t start writing until I was in my 20s and already a mother of two children. I started writing poetry as an art student at the University of New Mexico and I didn’t plan to become a poet. I grew up always drawing, always painting. I loved music and reading poetry, but I had no idea I could ever become a poet because at those career day fairs, there were never tables for poets. There were no Muskogee Creek poets in our neighborhood. In fact, I don’t remember knowing of any poets in Tulsa. I knew there were musicians, but I didn’t know they were poets. It wasn’t until I was a student in college at the University of New Mexico when I first heard native poets reading. Haunani Kay Trask was the first Hawai‘ian poet I ever met and we became good friends. I’ve discovered there are poets all over the world. Every country, every culture, every
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community, has a poet. Poets are needed like trees. Think about what trees do. Trees gather up messages and they hear all kinds of messages from the wind, they hear the truth when no one else is around to listen to the quiet. Poets are the truth tellers. We look around and we write about things people are thinking about, but don’t have words for. What we write about in poetry, we can’t figure out the words for, if we try to write it out like a narrative. But we go to a poem, to read it or to write it, and take a deep breath, and start moving.
This next poem came to me when the word got out in the community that I was writing poetry and somebody said, “We need a poem for the young poets coming out, the young poets who are just getting started.” This poem probably came from this word I like: remember. The word “remember” has a certain cadence and rhythm. So I started writing, and then the poetry spirit started helping me with this question: “What is it that we need to remember?”
So I end with this poem with these questions: “What is it that you need to remember? What is it that you’re carrying? What stories are you carrying?”
You have a lot of exploration to do. You’re just beginning, so keep your hearts and minds open. Always walk forward with compassion and a sense of beauty, even when you’re involved in conflict or pain.
Remember
Remember the sky you were born under. Know each of the stars’ stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn that is the strongest point of time.
Remember sundown in the giving away to night.
Remember your birth how your mother struggled to give you form and breath.
You’re evidence of her life, and her mothers, and hers.
Remember your father, he is your life also.
Remember the earth, whose skin you are red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth, brown earth we, are earth.
remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories too.
Talk to them, listen to them, they are alive poems.
Remember the wind remember her voice.
She knows the origin of this universe.
Remember that you are all people and all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe and this universe is you.
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Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you. Remember that language comes from this.
Remember.
Remember.
This poem was given to me. Yes, I got out my tools: my pen, my timetime is a tool - my quiet, and I sat there with it. I had to construct a house for it and a useful structure was repetition. And I listened. That poem has walked beside me my whole journey of becoming a poet. I’m reading it here for you so that maybe it will walk beside you and help you to remember who you are, the importance of your being, why you are here, and what you have to contribute as a young poet. Thank you.
Aloha mai e nā haku mele! Aloha mai kākou all of you poets! Hoʻomaikaʻi loa!
I want to begin by congratulating all of you for your beautiful and moving poems and for listening to your naʻau guiding you toward poetry. You are all part of a long legacy of poets living in our beautiful islands. Like the poets before you, you get to live in one of the most beautiful and amazing places on Earth and everyday you are loved by ‘āina, fed by ʻāina, protected by ʻāina. Part of being a poet in this beautiful place of Hawaiʻi means that you have the awesome kuleana of loving our ʻāina back with your powerful poems and stories that only you can share with the world. Be thankful, respect, and love this beautiful place in all you do, and teach others, even those who are just visiting, to aloha ʻāina, to mālama ʻāina like you do. And read your poems to the ‘āina. You’ll be surprised by how the ʻāina may show you, through a light wind or a gentle rain, how much it means to hear your words.
I’ll share part of a long poem with you now called “‘Āina Hānau” and it is written in 16 sections. I wrote the poem for my keiki, Kaikainaliʻi and Ku‘uleihiwahiwa. This part of the poem, the sixteenth and final section, shares my wishes for them, but it also shares my wishes for every one of you, too:
E kuʻu mau ʻōmaka i ke kīhāpai: may you always know these islands, like you, Daughters, are more than enough, know that like you, they are everything beautiful, everything buoyant. Their winds
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“EXCERPT FROM “ʻĀINA HĀNAU,” SECTION 16
Brandy Nālani McDougall HAWAIʻI STATE POET LAUREATE
and rains and mountains, ravines and valleys love without question. Like our islands, may you give birth first to yourselves then love always with green tenderness, thrusting your hands into mud, opening your body into ocean, knowing these islands are here for you, for your children and their children, knowing we are these islands. For you, may there always be refuge, safety within the walls you reach, behind borders, under flags, and in your own bodies. May you always be grateful for peace, for open harbors not freely entered, for treaties honored, for nothing taken that was not first given, for iwi still earthed, for new coral growth unbleached, for black cloud cover and trees, breathable air, a beach, stream, or ocean without plastic tangle or sewage or toxic seep.
I wish you words and medicines that lift and heal, vegetables and fruit from organic earth, free-flowing waters
from mountain to ocean, Daughters, cool and clean, unowned, shared. I wish you ocean-salted rocks and shells you can taste and hold in your mouth, blades of grass and ridged bark—all coolness and warmth to press to your cheek, to your lips. May you know love in every form, but always in the food you eat, that you love the crust dried poi makes on the skin around your lips, the dark green of lūʻau, soft steam of ʻulu, of ʻuala, the way you must slurp the red wild of ʻōhiʻa ʻai—all from ʻāina you’ve curled your toes into—may you always be full.
May there be hiding places to keep you as hidden as you want, climbing places to keep you above, flying places, resting places, low-lying and high cliff caves, more places carved by winds and rains, salt and waves, fragrant jungles, terraced gardens, islands old and still being born, places where you wait for welcome, places that you know are not for you or anyone to enter—may you protect all of those places and may they protect you.
May the wind and waves lift you up and may you let yourself fly, wonder,
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from a pali overlook as ʻiwa or pueo circle above, or as koholā or naiʻa breach through ocean in the distance, about lightness and sky—that you remember you can rise high above whatever may hold you down.
May you hear these islands breathe with you, let them be big enough to carry you, small enough to carry with you. May you know these islands depend on your breath, that the ocean, rains, and winds need your voice. That every green growing thing lives and births more green growing.
That there is safety and warmth enough, shade enough when you need it—water, food, shelter, love.
That you sleep deeply and let yourself hear our kūpuna.
May you know smallness—know to be careful and think of unseen workings, to remember the smallest can be the strongest, to feel you are islands like ours, not separated by ocean—but threaded—your roots woven and fed by the same fire and water and salt and darkness.
May you know immensity, too— that even when you think you are alone, that you feel the ocean in your sweat and tears, that you watch rain wash the hillsides into a dark stream and see your skin, that the sun, moon and stars, dark underwater caverns, underground rivers, all you see and donʻt see of ʻāina, are your kūpuna, your ‘ohana in your every breath, that something of you, something of all of us before, and something of all of us to come are these islands. May this always be with you: E ola mau, e ola nō.
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With an abundance of commas (it is always the commas), I want you to tell me about your day, the things your hands want to hold, if you love me, with all of the commas in the world.
I’ll reserve alliterations for myself. for tentative titles, tattered feelings, tomorrow’s lunch order. Give me a sestina, for my birthday, perhaps, and I will provide the rhymes. Please omit the pentameters, and think of the bedside journal as you write.
I promise I’ll get married in rhyme schemes. Conceal them in the vows and the prenup. The blue and borrowed, the fringe and the seams. Immortalized love in a champagne cup.
Sometimes I think I am the metaphor; the body sunk into a tabloid; the older daughter; the peonies in the cellophane wrap; the essayist; the best friend; the Gemini.
From the sestina to the pentameter, you will hear my rhymes, and my love, perhaps, am I the bedside journal, or the hand as you write?
Maybe I talk with too many commas. Perhaps the alliteration is getting old, and the sestinas are losing their shape. The rhyme schemes are screaming, and scraping, finally fleeting. I think I might be the metaphor.
24 25 Koren Kano 12TH GRADE
THE POEM
ODE TO THE MOON
I wake up to you in the morning Stark white against the blue eyed sky sometimes full sometimes half sometimes barely there at all I think we relate in that way I feel like I’m barely there at all too but I like it best when you fall I wish you were always full you deserve to be the brightest version of yourself right now and forever you inspire me to be full and bright thank you
I hope the night is good to you
I hope the morning holds you tight
I hope you find peace in the solitude
I hope you find solidarity in the sun it’s OK to go through phases how else could you ever be whole quiet beauty that’s what you are so unaware of the effect you have on others do you know how people stare at you? do you see how people admire you?
I admire you too, you know I bet it’s hard to pay attention but try look how loved you are
FREE SPIRIT
The spirit inside of me yearns to be free. It craves to know more than dull pencils, and crumpled note paper stuffed in a backpack. More than the clatter of keys underneath my tired fingers, and the filling in of bubbles on a test decorated with tear splatters. It desires to explore past the 200 pound textbooks, the five page analytical essays on countries I will never visit, and the weekly mental breakdowns and the dark bags that droop beneath my blue eyes. The spirit inside of me yearns to be free to run down sandy shores as the sky glows orange and pink while soft waves chase after me, the cool water wrapping around my sandy ankles. The spirit inside of me yearns to be free to run down cracked pavement under the cover of night guided only by twinkling city lights and the glow of the moon. To drive down open country roads with the windows down feeling the whip of the wind in my hair, gulping in the fresh air. The spirit inside of me yearns to be free.
26 27 Eliana Pimental 12TH GRADE
Harley Wolters 11TH GRADE
Truth is the fog that cascades into San Francisco; the fog that envelops the hills in a blanket of white, that cools the air and nourishes the soul. Go ahead… reach. Reach out your hand and try to touch the fog that brings life, and wonder, and longing, and confusion. Can you feel it? It’s okay if you can’t. You can keep trying until the sun bursts through in all of its overwhelming brilliance and burns the fog into nothingness.
Truth is the fire that brings warmth. Refreshing warmth, on the days when frost grows on the windows overnight and when icicles spring from the eaves.
Truth is the fire that burns. It burns, it burns, it sears your heart and your soul like a roaring flame and makes you question everything–everything you have ever known.
Truth is the fire that perches atop the lone candle on the altar just
like a maraschino cherry on a sundae. It represents hope, peace, light. The quiet beauty within. The flame flickers–incessantly in motion–until a puff of air leaves behind an ember, glowing yellow then orange then red. And a trail of smoke that winds up and up and up until it dissipates.
Truth is the pitter patter of rain on a windowsill after the storm has passed. Rays of sunlight pierce the clouds and give you a taste of heaven; it’s sweet, like honey, and melts on the tongue. Tap, tap, silence. Tap. Unpredictable, yet faithful all the same–a different kind of music. Silence. Perhaps a rainbow will soon be drawn across the canvas of dull clouds in the vivid hues of nature’s palette. Wait here, in silence. Listen, and perhaps you will find.
Truth is the swell of the ocean, the sweet lullaby of waves on rock.
28 29 Esther Chan 10TH GRADE
IN ESSENCE
How can it be so ruthless and yet so gentle?
Multidimensional. It’s okay, you can lay down and close your eyes. Rest, and I will wake you when the time comes. Truthfully. For truth is, and always will be, the deep blue water that falls and rises and falls again. Until it rises…
NIGHT MARCHERS
The time of the Night Marchers has returned bringing sadness and despair
I lie on a wooden beam, head turned to the floor with my knees bent like broken pieces of paper
Burning blistering flames surround me like a string of lights. A conch shell is blown. A drum is played. The day is done. And I pray to see one last ray of sunlight as the voices of the dead surround me like a blanket of snow.
I look up at the dead realizing that every person holds a story.
I feel as if I am in a book as I stare at their hollowed out faces weathered by time.
Faces that speak truths so powerful I am thrown back into reality.
I jolt back in fear as I hear their screams sounding like elbow joints not oiled for centuries.
I wait for a while, feeling like I am stuck in a timelock. Then they disappear, and all is right in the world again.
All my emotions have evaporated into pieces of a stained glass window. I almost start to hope they come back, because I know they will.
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Anabella Charles 5TH GRADE
we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors we borrow it from our children a Native American proverb
there is a mother here
her skin has known the salt of broken oceans her hands have traced the sun until it became her she learned respect from a father and his hands how the bones of dead flowers made their garden a burial ground her body was her family’s burial ground her mouth an untamed flame
it escaped and left with her voice in it her reflection appeared and shattered there is a brother here
he has been taught to breathe air as dark as his skin
there are no lights in the city of stars that do not reach him some days he feels paperweight in his dreams he is flying
he’s forgotten the smell of grass and his mother
he’s forgotten the sounds of the wind what it means to fly in his dreams he carries a star in his pocket but it burns from the inside out it reminds him of himself, that there is a burning within him
there is a father here
he overflows into his mother guarding her flame
Licking his stubborn skin as he swallows the ocean whole
he writes odes to himself until his blood becomes a dead rose
and as the sea levels rise they run like a Crimson mouth Psalm as children curl like wayward leaves in a storm shake their sea blue hands as these hands over turn burial grounds as burial grounds become his mother a father becomes a son in mourning there is a daughter here she’s been taught how to sustain on seas but to never settle for them to treat the ground how she treats her body to till the earth until she too is the sun when morning arrives she finds the shattered reflexions of her mother and recalls the pieces of countless oceans converging where she stands you can hear an echo of lineage the sound of 1,000 daughters mother sons and fathers how they become a garden how their voices bloom among the scattered bones and carry like seeds to wind
32 33 Meera Das Gupta 17 YEARS OLD, NEW YORK CITY 2021 NATIONAL YOUTH POET LAUREATE LINEAGE
MY LIFE WITH THE OCEAN
Flying home, after school, I race to the beach.
Sliding into the foamy waves, I go under, and everything quiets. Muffled sounds drift through the water, and I long to stay there forever.
As I surface, I squint into the amber sun before it slips behind the Ko‘olaus. At dawn, we jump on the boat. The ripples fan out on the glassy water as we set off. We look for birds to show the way.
Dropping lines to troll, I see the wake sliced in two like a rooster’s tail. The scream of the reel tells of a lively prospect, as yet unseen.
As shadows lengthen, I pull it in.
Glittering scales flash in the golden sun. Everyone shouts and laughs. An ocean harvest to share with many. My band of brothers, fishermen all.
PROMISES
Each day, I see news broadcasts which read like dystopian fantasies–a jagged history. Lists of the dead and pictures, alive with heavy sorrow. Alive in the way their subjects will never again be. And among the faces, whose souls were robbed, there is always one which looks like mine.
My face which looks like my mother’s, who came to this country when she was a girl, younger than I am now. Her mother uprooted her life of cherry blossoms, taking her family to a land balanced on the foundation of hope and promises.
34 35 Kealoha Comcowich 9TH GRADE
Mika Hiroi 10TH GRADE
This land, built on promises. Because promises are what best hide fear. Because promises are what best create power. Because promises are what best clean blood off the pavement. Promises, which often conceal the faces of citizens whose burgled souls flash by on the news.
These faces, which look almost like a mirror in which I see a reflection of our collective pain.
I dream of people like me, whose bodies are pushed and pinned, pulled and pressed: The grinding grievances of people who have no choice.
And when the sun rises in the morning, I promise, I see beauty, not the shadows of nightfall on the sidewalk.
Sidewalks where people are twisted until they can’t breathe. But sidewalks are not only a place of hands in pockets, dark hair hidden in hats, and eyes on me.
I’ve seen feet firm on the pavement. I’ve seen fists in the air, united, and calling to freedom. I’ve seen roads, filled corner to corner, with people I thought had no choice, who seemed forever trapped beneath the layers of lies, which are what best hold a country at bay.
Now I see them–us–break free and fight for what was once promised to all, but only granted to some.
Instead of being beaten red, black, and blue, we fight for what we should have been born with.
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Because we deserve it. We don’t deserve to be made helpless and hiding. We fight for what we need:
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a fair chance and equal rights, love and hope and wide smiles. We promise that we will walk into the future, a future which we will make ourselves. A future we will make beautiful.
ALWAYS
She is always there by the riverbed
With her creel laden with small fruit she had gathered With desire to do a decent meal that nox She was frequently jeered at having the weight of poverty to handle.
But she was always about. Hoping to be noticed
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4TH GRADE
Vaiva Peroff
ODE TO MESSES
I stand in the middle of my room, crumpled up paper, pens, clothes on my floor Life is messy, sometimes you just have to make do with the chaos that you have.
Thoughts are like race cars on a track in your head, always thinking of what to wear next what to say to the classmate you like what homework is due tomorrow what pencil to use and where are your books?
Life is REALLY messy sometimes and pretty complex. But you’ll get through it. You’ll make due of it.
Our Queen, Lili‘uokalani, held prisoner in her room. As resplendent and efficacious as she was, she too was held captive amongst a mess. Used her tears as thread, her sorrow as fabric and sewed together the most alluring creation our eyes have ever seen. A quilt birthed from messes. Her pride and love poured into the colors. The memory of her land lingering in her head always.
A mess of her people in anguish as a foreign government took over. They’re guns labeled power & money. They’re bullets of hatred coated with selfishness.
A mess of probably her own mind. Sorrow and melancholy. despair and desperation. Each were planets probably taking up occupation in the space in her head.
But also with her questions came faith and hope, optimism above all others.
She tore dresses apart and ripped curtains for fabric. Embedded in her quilt is the impact felt from other egotistical actions.
You see from messes of dresses, and messes of others’ heads She built.
She set her foundation. when all else was shaking and storming. Her quilt, evidenced above all, that if you have faith, your messes can turn into beauty your turmoil into calm seas your mayhem and chaos to blue skies and gentle breezes.
40 41 Kalehua Fung CLASS OF 2021 2022 HAWAIʻI STATE YOUTH POET LAUREATE
You may not see it yet, but surely it’s coming. This is an ode to messes because from it, there is redemption. From it, there is creation. and from there, growth. This is an ode to messes, because from them the most magnificent butterflies are created.
GIFTED AND GRANTED
Just like normal necessities one minute we have it and 2021 takes advantage for weeks. We are ruining our earth every chance we get. Beat COVID that’s it. No one cares about the Earth, global warming, or poverty. Everything disappears in our mind when we watch the news over and over with the CDC showing us ho w to survive. Two years later we are starting to reunite and take back our lives realizing how much we spread the lies.
All hopes and dreams have been crushed and flushed. We are getting ready for a new year, a new redo. Let’s make it better and do our parts over with the correct way for once.
The hatred, littering, lying, and stupidity have gotten past us before but not this time. So listen when I say HELP!
Our world is crying.
It’s not just a scream. Listen to me.
Help our world before we get caught in our own mistakes. Our recklessness isn’t helping.
We shoot our world down hoping it grows back.
Growing back like how we think species will magically do. It has come to animals not being able to walk on ice and humans being treated like mosquitoes where the first thought is to kill.
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Makaela Cooper 7TH GRADE
Just STOP the wrong and let the ones who are right, make a path for us to follow.
Do your part and help the world out as much as you can. We only have one chance to correct the damage.
Don’t forget this isn’t a warning, it is a plea for help. Save the world before our mistakes cost any more lives.
COURAGE
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
Justice for all.
Justice for all, we say, monotone voices joining millions in the pledge we speak to reassure and remember our history, the teetering jenga tower of events missing black and queer and female and other stories like leaves blown away in a constantly drifting, constantly ignorant wind.
Justice for all.
Justice for all.
Justice for George Floyd, murdered for nothing but a counterfeit bill and the color of his skin, justice for Rosalind Franklin, credit lost because of her gender, justice for Ahmaud Arbery, shot dead for fitting a profile, justice for Ukraine, children’s ears ringing with sirens and fire over one man’s declaration, justice for the climate, for the thousands upon thousands of tree-trucks shattered in our hands, justice, impossible justice, for the world we live in.
The world we love in.
I want to scream until my throat’s wrung raw, until tears trickle in slow steady streams down my cheeks so I can
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Miya Peterson 10TH GRADE
feel the pain of the world, and the weight so many carry so effortlessly.
I want to raise my fist with those who need power, and mourn with those who are lost and have lost. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
I pledge allegiance to the suffering we’ve withstood, the back-breaking soul-crushing strength it takes to keep going,
I pledge allegiance to the people who take a stand and who sacrifice, I pledge allegiance to those whose hearts are brave enough to break the pillars of what we call history,
and let the buds of real truth bloom.
I pledge allegiance to the people.
PRESERVATION OF THE MAGIC
You are told stories growing up. Fairytales of places long ago full of fancy, frivolous things: treasure, magic, creatures with wings. Pages painted with such description you wish you could just jump inside, close the cover, and remain pressed between the sheets. A human bookmark
absorbing the words so that you can remember them.
Remember the tales. Remember the glittering moss and the morning dew and the talking animals.
Remember the sparkle of the sun as it sets on the sea.
Remember the secrets of the forest with the hidden cottage behind the old pine tree. Remember the whisper of the wind, or the rush of the water in the riverbed that led to a castle on the very top of the hill.
Remember the magic.
So when the world becomes too much, and you can’t reach the words, you can escape, following the trail that your younger self left you little pink tags
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Rachel Waggoner 11TH GRADE
tied around branches, to keep you on track. Remain in the comfort of the wandering paths connecting you to far-off places. Continue walking them, clearing the ground of debris and foliage. You can choose to lose yourself, in order to save yourself, and preserve your access to the magic. Rather than trying to face the darkness of the world without it.
I HOPE YOU KNOW
I am an undying pulse choked in stifling darkness. My blackness is light. My blackness ripples against the wind. But your heinous words distort the vision of my blackness until a blurred rendition remains. My limbs chained and my thoughts are shackled as I tremble, and you try to hold me down locked behind your hate. My soul grows weary. My blackness grows fatigued. That much I have gleaned from its tearful silence.
It’s not always easy to turn the other cheek or to suppress the feeling of your barbed words piercing my tender skin while remembering the tears that tessellated down my face cementing my repression.
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12TH
2021
STATE YOUTH POET
Lua Bowman
GRADE
HAWAIʻI
LAUREATE
Tired of the social purgatory
I couldn’t dilute my anger. Your comrades paint me as aggressive and hostile. You left me liable to collect and protect the dirt that you spilled. Preventing me from freedom while maintaining your pollution.
Restoration is not always found after apologies are given. But you have taught me that forgiveness made me free from my prison.
Bondaged by the pain you’ve caused me I can’t stop guessing what you’re up to.
Like a foam of whispers the slurs you uttered into existence revisit me in my sleep.
Such satiating slaughter prying on every last bit of belligerent and strident radical thought
I use to defend my humanity.
But I know you forgot this.
You forgot I belong to a community that solidified the meaning of resistance and self-determination.
You forgot at the core of my identity is the spirit of defiance, anchored in an ongoing pursuit of freedom and liberation.
You forgot I’ve learned to handle those with grace, precision, and the ferocity that comes with being a descendant of those who have dealt with white supremacist nonsense for too long.
You forgot that I am the descendant of those who’ve waltzed to the revolutionary symphonies the harmonious truths of liberty.
Who tasted it. Who saw it and who bled it through their melanated hands.
So while my melanin aches and sheds tears of blackness
I remember my melanin is more than my source of destruction. I remember it’s more than my source of despair.
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KUNG HEI FAT CHOY!
The ring of the Golden, Iridescent Bell
On top of the door
Notifies everyone of new customers coming in for more
“Welcome, How Many?”
The smell of freshly made dim sum
Wafts your nose and makes your mouth water
Tables filled to the edge
With dishes, food, and tea cups
Lines of customers await at every corner
Waitresses and Waiters walk the hallways
Walking up and down to capture every order.
“I would like to Order!”
My father says to catch the attention
Of any waiter who isn’t busy
The waiter heard and yells to his co-workers
Sharp, loud Chinese alerts everyone’s attention
All at once, piles of dim sum appear
A basket opens releasing white, hot steam
Showing perfectly aligned food
Waiting for it to be consumed
“Enjoy your food!”
Sesame balls, Sticky Rice with Lotus Leaf
Stuffed Eggplant, Steamed Pork Buns, and Sponge Cake
Eyes of my family widen with the amount of food
Tea is poured into tea cups
Chopsticks are raised
Ready to eat the long awaited food
“That was delicious! Until next time.”
Dishes are emptied, plates smeared with sauce
Tea cups dirtied with lipstick stains on the rim
Glass water cups emptied with only
Clear ice cubes stacked at the bottom
Bellies of my family are seen protruding out of their pants
Satisfied grins on everyone’s faces
Heavy eyelids are drooping, effort is seen trying to keep them open
Stomachs are filled, it is time to go home
谢谢 (Xièxiè) for the meal!”
My family of four leaves the table
The sound of chairs scraping against the floor
The restaurant has died down with time passing
My father pays at the front desk
Watching steaming baskets of food still leaving the kitchen
He comes back and we walk towards the front door
We leave our Saturday lunch tradition
The door opens causing the familiar ring
Of the golden, iridescent bell
Welcoming customers
“Ding Ding!”
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“
10TH
Julia Leong
GRADE
THE GREATNESS IN ME
E hō mai ka ʻike mai luna mai e.
O nā mea huna no‘eau no nā mele e.
E hō mai.
E hō mai.
E hō mai.
Just like the goddess Pele erupts in fire
I step to the mic and erupt with a fiery verse scorching the earth.
My poetry heats hearts
I’m a living breathing work of art.
I fight hard to win my wrestling and judo matches like Thurgood Marshall fought to end segregation in American schools
I have the vision to solve any math problem like Vivian Thomas had the vision for a heart procedure to save the lives of blue babies.
Just like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech told the nation to rise above segregation
I will rise above hatred letting the world know: Black Lives Ma tter!
I will free myself from the evil of being bad and bullied just like Harriet Tubman freed slaves using the Underground Railroad.
I won’t let the history of Hawai‘i die just like King Kalākaua wouldn’t let hula die.
When the missionaries banned hula King Kalākaua said, “Let them dance on my birthday,” which became the Merry Monarch Festival.
I will be strong and fearless like King Kamehameha the Great the first chief to unite all the Hawai‘ian islands I lift my weighted ball like King Kamehameha lifted the Naha stone. I will always be proud, fighting, working for what I want and believe in like Malcom X told the people during the Civil Rights Movement “Nobody can give you freedom, equality, justice or anything. If you’re a man you can, and will take it.”
I’m going to show the world who I am once COVID blows by.
I’m the kid with the dope words with looks so fly
I’m going to be the longest reigning poetry champ in history. No one will beat me, not even Z. Everyone will call me Kid BPE: Best Poet Ever
I’ma be an OG in the poetry community.
Thurgood Marshall, MLK, Harriet Tubman, Kalākaua and Kamehameha. These are the greatest people in the world to me besides my mom and dad
I will always use the greatness my ancestors gave me in my everyday life My ancestors are the greatness in my body and soul they are the reason I can never give up I must always try because I know they are watching me from up in the sky
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Korion Williams 6TH GRADE
The branches dance and the wind braids my hair.
Hula-dancing trunks toot from my toes.
Our thighs scratch from steamed pebbles
Our feet blister from barbed sandpaper
Then the sun gives us compliments
And we blush.
Dust painted windows and whispers through curtains
The sunlight like water filling the room
Dust bubbles of dancing specks
We lounge with some pages
We speak tunes of memories
Then the sun spits the match
And we blink.
The rise of ours chests and the smell of the moon
The stars that rid monsters
Who can’t scare under light.
My hair pets the satin
My bones take their nap
The sun is a memory
And we nod.
2. Buds
Barefooted blisters kiss the marsh
Limbs wrangled in vines
Upturning each rock.
Like fat on a pig, The layers of heaven descend.
Air cuts clean with a breeze
And chills the beads and the dew.
Grip your stiff rib cage
And unclothe it from the spine.
Home is a flavor
Breathe the mint and mold.
Taste the space
The womb of the soul
The base of the heart.
3. A Street Somewhere in Hilo
You ask me what you are
But child, I do not know.
You inquire stories
The ones I wrote,
But no clarity walks with these tales.
Enjoy your lumpia, Sweet girl.
Sink into the buns.
Slurp the papaya-stained soup, Wrap your musubi.
Your mother is mine, So you are us.
No need to doubt.
Why question your roots
When you have grown from the vine, And crawled from your heritage’s womb.
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1. 2952
Shea Noland 12TH GRADE
DIPTYCH: A TALE OF TWO GRANDFATHERS
Grandpa Ken
Don’t ask don’t tell meant something different in those days.
They went. Most of them reluctantly like timid children on the first day of school. Dread and excitement heavy as wet cement in their stomachs. They didn’t want to go. But they did. They didn’t have a choice.
And when they came home, no one asked. And no one told.
He went, my grandfather. And when he returned he was not the same.
His okaasan heard him crying at night.
“No one cares about us,” he whispered to her. No one asked. No one told.
It sounds so glamorous.
Flying spy planes from Long Binh, La Drang, Khe Sanh, Dien Bien Phu.
But he had to kill people.
People with almond-shaped eyes just like his. People with families and hopes and dreams. Just like him.
They haunted him, those children with his eyes. But when he returned home, no one asked. And he didn’t tell.
He was always joking, my grandfather. Never serious.
Always with a silver can in his hand, wet with condensation in the humid Hawaiʻi air, Even at 8 a.m.
But there was a tarnish on his shine, like a rusty nail left too long in the rain.
Past the point of useful, but still sharp, still able to do damage.
His own pain remained on the inside. We didn’t ask.
He didn’t tell.
PopPop
When he was a boy my PopPop played sports on a continuous loop.
Football basketball
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Kensington Ono 10TH GRADE
baseball football
basketball baseball.
Football. Basketball. Baseball.
He was a golden boy on the court and on the field, where the tuahine rain of Mānoa shrouded his buffnblue uniform in mist.
When he was grown my PopPop coached sports on a continuous loop. Football football football football football football.
Football. Football. Football.
“He is a guru,” some said. “A savant! He knows this game better than most.” People in Hawai‘i grumbled:
“He’s taking all the Hawai‘ian boys away from home to play in the shadow of the Wasatch mountains at a school that’s mostly white.”
And then that school, the one that was mostly white, announced they were building a new sports facility.
Pale-faced men in suits gathered everyone to tell them the news.
“We’re going to build!” they crowed.
“And we’ve got all the Chinamen lined up, ready to work.”
Inside my PopPop’s stomach roiled, a tiny boat adrift in a massive sea. Thinking of his own grandfather who had sailed from Canton Province all those years ago.
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TO VARIOUS NATIONS
My great grandmother, a doctor, attends to the nationalist army captain’s wife, who tells her to “flee, take your family and run,” she says.
Divide my body into two parts, where the 黄河 cleaves over my breasts, stretching down to my navel. And I shout: “think of your children! think of the separations!” the way the river erodes the banks from which I was made—loess sediment and a man’s left rib.
Mother, when the blood runs back in my nose and down my throat, it’s more than just red—see!?
This is my lifeline, weightier than an ocean’s salt water.
When I was born, they cut the red thread connecting us, And I felt the world crash into existence, but you clung to me, the same way a collapsing lung suffocates a word.
This is my birthright, bread broken for me the same way my feet aren’t, you tell me, this is how a woman walks, this is how a woman grows old.
This is how a woman lets herself be made into a river, this is how you separate yourself by way of the river, this is what you call
the war when you win, this is how you pronounce it when you lose.
You tell me you have sloughed away your skin for me, for my sake, this is a privilege. I say no, this is a pain in the throat, an ache in the chest. I tell you “I know this pain,” and I do.
Do you see what I mean, of making and undoing?
Mother, there has been a birth. we are not ready.
* 黄河 : Yellow River, also known as “China’s Sorrow”
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1.
Nicole Dao 11TH GRADE
If you open up any atlas and take a look at a map of the world, almost every single one of them slices the Pacific Ocean in half. To the human eye, every map centers all the land masses on Earth creating the illusion that water can handle the butchering and be pushed to the edges of the world.
As if the Pacific Ocean isn’t the largest body living today, beating the loudest heart
the reason why land has a pulse in the first place.
The audacity one must have to create a visual so violent as to assume that no one comes
from water so no one will care what you do with it and yet, people came from land are still coming from land and look what was done to them.
When people ask me where I’m from, they don’t believe me when I say water. So instead, I tell them that home is a machete
and that I belong to places that don’t belong to themselves anymore broken and butchered places that have made me a hyphen of a woman:
a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both colonizer and colonized both blade and blood
California stolen.
Samoa sliced in half stolen. California, nestled on the western coast of the most powerful country on this planet
Samoa, an island so microscopic on a map, it’s no wonder people doubt its existence
California, a state of emergency away from having the drought rid it of all its water
Samoa, a state of emergency away from becoming a saltwater cemetery if the sea level doesn’t stop rising.
When people ask me where I’m from, what they want is to hear me speak of land what they want is to know where I go once I leave here the privilege that comes with assuming that home is just a destination, and not the panic.
Not the constant migration that the panic gives birth to. What is it like? To know that home is something
that’s waiting for you to return to it?
What does it mean to belong to something that isn’t sinking? What does it mean to belong to what is causing the flood?
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ARTIST,
Terisa Siagatonu AWARD-WINNING POET, TEACHING
MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATOR, AND COMMUNITY LEADER ATLAS
So many of us come from water but when you come from water no one believes you. Colonization keeps laughing. Global warming is gr inning
all at your grief.
How you mourn the loss of a home that isn’t even gone yet. That no one believes you’re from.
How everyone is beginning to hear more about your island but only in the context of vacation and honeymoons football and military life exotic women exotic fruit exotic beaches but never asks about the rest of its body. The water.
The islands breathing in it. The reason why they’re sinking.
No one visualizes islands in the Pacific as actually being ther e. You explain and explain and clarify and correct their incorrect pronunciation and explain until they remember just how vast your ocean is how microscopic your islands look in it how easy it is to miss when looking on a map of the world.
Excuses people make for why they didn’t see it before.
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“We write poetry to demand radical documentation, collaboration, and celebration. The National Youth Poet Laureate Program has taught me that poetry is a tool for liberation, to raise critical consciousness, and to reimagine justice in our society.”
This program is funded by the generous support of the County of Maui, Office of Economic Development, a grant from the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities, through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
AAny views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the Maui Arts & Cultural Center and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Lua Bowman, 2022 Hawaiʻi’s First Youth Poet Laureate
