Frances Kakugawa
Special to The Hawai‘i Herald
April
The poets, in droves
Lick their pens, salivating
Over metaphors, turning
Death into life. It must be
National Poetry Month.
To dear Ukraines,
Each time a poet
Puts pen to paper,
There is a sliver of hope
For Peace.
The Pen
I was but a child
When I wrote my first line of poetry
That senselessly rhymed.
I innocently thought
It would be my ticket
Out of God-forsaken Kapoho:
A ticket away from kerosene lamps,
Outhouses, battery-run radios,
And Pidgin English.
A ticket to Greenwich Village, New York City,
Paris, and Stockholm, Sweden.
Little did I know
That poetry would help me embrace
Each Ukrainian standing tall
To the minuscule monstrous thief.
Peace
Under Putin’s rain
A dove spreads its broken wing
Blackened, bent with pain.
The call of a child
‘Neath the once horizon blue
Beckons one-winged flights.
The flapping of wings
Against Putin’s bloody rain
The one-winged dove soars.
Sunflower
The thunderstorm sends flashes of fire
Icy, cold stones of hail…
A sunflower seed cracks open it’s shell
Pushes, pushes, through fire and ice
It’s first sign of life forth
Toward the promised morn…
Soon, soon, from Kyiv to Mariupol
From Lviv to Odesa
A thousand sunflowers
Burst into the new morn.
Pearl Harbor
Under the rising sun
The enemy came
Wearing my face.
Hiroshima
We sliced the chrysanthemum
Off its stalk
And left it naked in the sun
Victory
Over the ashes of Hiroshima
Our victory was hailed.
Beneath, my ancestors lay buried.
Frances Kakugawa is a former Hawai‘i Herald columnist. She was her mother’s primary caregiver during her five-year journey with Alzheimer’s disease. A native of Kapoho on Hawai‘i island, she now lives in Sacramento. Frances has melded her professional training as a writer and educator and her personal caregiving experiences to write several books on caring for people with memory-related illnesses. She is a sought-after speaker, both in Hawai‘i and on the Mainland, sharing strategies for caregiving, as well as coping with the stresses of caregiving.
