Hawaii - Day One

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Old Wordsworth never took an airplane flight,
Nor gazed with godlight elevated sight
Upon the Earth spread out in azure purity--
And Shelley never railed against Security.

Hail Muse! We travellers of the modern world,
Scoring your altitudes with wings unfurled,
Viewing your visions, sporting in your skies,
Your lofty stratas open to our eyes,
By rights should rain the world with poetry
Pure from your aery hospitality.
And yet, torpedoed in our steel machines,
Shades pulled against your grand eternal scenes,
Cramped out from windows six or seven deep,
Benumbed by droning habit into sleep,
Slaves in the hold of commerce, we sit dumb,
And Poets very few of us become.

My shade is up: the wide Pacific breast
Rolls under foaming clouds out to the West,
Over the curved horizon of the ball,
And water fills the four horizons all.
We're flying to Hawaii -— magic words!
I hear their glory mid the deafened herds.
O Muse, forgive our trespass of your space
And let me glimpse your freckled, smiling face
From out the forms and castles of your throne,
Finding my window, singling out my own:
Lend me a sniff of sky, a scrap of cloud,
To justify vacations to the crowd.

Our plane touched down in Kona at midday.
We disembarked the fond old-fashioned way,
Onto the tarmac, free to wander in,
Breathe the true air and let the trip begin.
Thus mine and Sara's anniversary
Started with open skies, humidity,
And tropic heat that reined our mainland race
And softened us into the Island pace.
We find our luggage, claim our rental car,
And, sweating, start to realize where we are.

What foreign scenes! What vast and alien land,
Hawaii, from the mountains to the sand
Stretched down across a wide and ragged plain
Under a smoggy sky of brooding rain
While yet the sun slants merciless across --
A lunar land of history and loss.
The road runs through the broken lava field,
Whose tumbled cubes seem dirt, plowed for a yield,
Almost like you could crumble it in your hand --
They're razor rocks. It's hard to understand.
The yellow gorse and palms cling for a perch,
And human structures too lick from the lurch,
Rebuilt across the wreckage, spanking new,
Or ticky-tack and lucky. From the few
Town streets descending to the island edge,
Blue ocean rises like a solid ledge,
A wall of nothingness rimming the world,
And everything's turned back and inward curled.
An Isle of Conquest: Nature's, also Man's --
The renovation of utopian plans
In ceaseless fierce replacement, rude and raw,
The hardened lava no less than the law;
Caldera's moonscapes beetling in crags,
And, at the airport, ours and unknown flags.
And this -- all this -- is beauty! First impression,
Fruit of half a day's bewildered session --
Rocks, grass, palms, the faded old hotel,
The ghosts, the muggy air, the thudding swell --
And all we did was park our rental car,
Change into shorts, drink at the ocean bar,
Nap from the jetlag to the roaring surf,
Find a shrimp dinner down the ratty scurf
Of party restaurants on Ali'i Drive --
And O! We love it all! So green! Alive!

--Matt