Come! Enjoy the beauty and serenity of our island paradise. If you want to discover Old Hawaii,
you owe it to yourself to visit us at Molokai Paradise. Our website is:
http://www.molokaiparadise.com
We have a SWEET COTTAGE and a GREAT BEACH HOUSE located on a tropical garden estate that's BEACHFRONT with spectacular views of Maui, Kahoolawe, and Lanai. Whales have been sighted right off our coast and the beach has been a favorite sunning spot for monk seals.
Visit http://www.molokaiparadise.com
Chances are your footprints will be the only ones on Honomuni Beach!
Rain After a Dry Year
The promised storm has come.
The weathermen are ecstatic.
Rain washes the bare limbs
Of the poplar.
Gopher mounds
Flatten and melt.
A distant eucalyptus
Sways in the hills.
The propane tank
Greens as if freshly painted.
The ground releases
The burnt grass smell of drought.
This change complicates matters;
Now the dead are expected
To be more than ornamental.
They are expected to recover.
The tumbleweeds are amused.
They roll and spin
In the wind
Like unsupervised children.
Loops of razored wire
Sparkle on the fence line.
A white egret lands in the field.
The earth shivers with life.
Come! Enjoy the beauty and serenity of our island paradise. If you want to discover Old Hawaii, you owe it to yourself to visit us at Molokai Paradise. Our website is: http://www.molokaiparadise.com
We have a SWEET COTTAGE and a GREAT BEACH HOUSE located on a tropical garden estate that's BEACHFRONT with spectacular views of Maui, Kahoolawe, and Lanai. Whales have been sighted right off our coast and the beach has been a favorite sunning spot for monk seals.
Chances are your footprints will be the only ones on Honomuni Beach!
Well, not exactly "small kid." More like Junior High. I'm trying to tunnel back to 7th and 8th Grade at Punahou. My first "real" writing experience was winning the 7th Grade Short Story Contest at Punahou. I wrote about a talking parrot of all things. The parrot ends up getting a crush on his owner's girlfriend, then seduces her by mimicking the owner's voice and rubbing her with his wing. A girl who ended up working for Geffen (SKG) came up and said, "That story was neat-o!"
Then I asked her to go to the Punahou Carnival with me.
I wrote the following after shopping for a New Baby Celebration card at a nearby Hallmark store. I saw something strange in the recycled paper when I held it up to the light:
New Baby Card
This New Baby card
Says on the back
It's printed
On recycled paper.
If I hold it up to the light
Just right,
I can make out
the Obituaries
From the L.A. Times,
January something, 1969.
A CEO from Silicon Valley just spent an enjoyable week at our SWEET BEACHFRONT COTTAGE with his family. He said he could tell from our pix on the website that we were far from the beaten path and that he wanted someplace that was like OLD HAWAII. "I found Paradise on Earth," he commented in a recent email. An attorney from DC who recently stayed at our BEACH HOUSE said our location was "the BEST on the island" and that our caretaker Pastor made her stay truely enjoyable.
Check us out at http://www.molokaiparadise.com
On Ocean Street, Carlsbad, California
A priest picks and shovels
Dirt at Saint Michael’s,
Digging in the courtyard.
Next door at Carlsbad Shores,
A woman is young again
Standing at her window.
Beyond the resthome,
A waiter silverwares tables
For the lunch crowd
At Fresco’s Ristorante.
We are all responsible
For something, some calling
To soften the hours
After the morning news.
The priest shovels
Balls of earth
Wired with dandelions.
Pink and yellow roses
Wait to be transplanted.
How much of us
Has been uprooted, excavated,
Replaced by charming
Blooms? The woman
Remains at her window.
She is watching
The clouds build mountains
Over the sea.
The closest I'd come to getting high was raising Kona Gold in plastic buckets out in the backyard. I'd planted seeds Steve gave me in the high potency mix my father used for his hydrangeas; it didn't take long for them to germinate. Because the breadfruit and lauhala trees shaded the low areas, I put the buckets on the shake roof to catch more sun. They were a foot tall in a month and my father never noticed. After I bragged about my green thumb to Steve, he drove me home one day in his Dodge Dart and asked to see the plants. We snuck in through the back gate and I took six buckets off the roof. Steve examined each plant as if he were a doctor making a house call—he sniffed shoots, squeezed stalks, and cut leaves with a Swiss Army knife attached to his key chain. I could see my mother through the screen door preparing dinner; she was wearing a pink dress and a blonde wig. She reminded me of Mrs. Brady in The Brady Bunch. Steve showed me how to increase bud production by pinching the shoots. I was getting nervous because it was almost pau hana time and my hapa haole father would be pulling into the driveway. He was a lawyer and was usually in a bad mood the second he got home from work.
"This'll help production," Steve said as he pinched.
"I can do that later," I replied.
"This your first crop ever?"
"Yeah."
"They're your keikis."
My mother walked out to the lanai carrying a ceramic bowl full of hamburger, bread crumbs, sour cream, and raw eggs. She was making meat loaf from a recipe she'd found in The Boston Globe.
"The secret is the sour cream," she announced .
"Oh, goody," I said, "now we'll all get constipated."
"You used to be a nice boy," she whispered.
To my mother, anything that came out of The Globe was like the Word of God because she'd been born and raised in Brookline. "Hello, Steve," she said as she kneaded the ingredients with one hand. Her fingers were covered with sour cream and bits of raw hamburger.
Steve continued pinching. "Hello, Mrs. Gill."
"Would you boys like a nice cold drink?"
"I'll swig a beer," Steve said.
"How about some guava juice?"
"Beer's got more vitamins."
My mother walked out to the lawn. "My," she said, "what beautiful plants. Is that really marijuana?"
Steve pulled a joint from the pocket of his Aloha shirt. "Wanna puff?"
"Oh, no," my mother said, shaking her head. "I don't want to take a bad trip."
"That's only from LSD," I said.
"Are you boys taking LSD?"
"Only when I surf," Steve replied.
My mother massaged the sour cream into the hamburger. "Better put those plants back before you know who gets home."
(okay, if u want more, PLEASE buy my book BEFORE THE CITY on Amazon! Please?)
During my senior year at Punahou School in Honolulu, my extracurricular activities included accompanying my friend Steve Johnson on his drug deals. We'd go off-campus and hang out outside the Lutheran Church—that's where Steve sold his magic mushrooms, Maui Wowie, Bangkok hash, and hash oil. The hash was being smuggled into Hawaii in hollowed-out boards and Steve knew the smuggler's brother so he got a good deal. He'd carry his drugs and paraphernalia, including a scale he'd ripped off from chemistry lab, in his mother's old cosmetic case. Steve's blond hair was a beacon to students searching for mind altering substances. Everyone from the Brains to the Jocks would show up on the Church lawn and even ROTC cadets marched across the street. Drugs had a way of bringing people together.
Steve and I had become friends after his chemistry textbook was stolen and I let him borrow mine on weekends. He'd been a Brain until his father died flying helicopter missions into Cambodia. He'd always thought of his father as a hero and, with him gone, he quit ROTC and got into drugs. Steve claimed the combination of hash and blotter acid damaged his eyesight and forced him to wear glasses. He couldn't wear contacts because his corneas were warped. He said drugs were destroying his sense of sight but they made up for it by stimulating his mind. Because most of the money he made supported his consumption of hash oil, he quit buying new clothes and ate only two scoops rice and gravy for lunch. He started shopping at Big 88 army surplus in the low rent district of Kalihi. He was the first to wear camouflage pants to school and he started a craze that swept through campus. Dean McQueen said it was a slam against the military. Miss Takata, my English teacher, made a camouflage skirt. It didn't take long for Sears and Liberty House to catch on and create entire camouflage sections. When I told Steve he should get a percentage, he said he'd gladly sell his rights for a quart of hash oil.
(let me know if you would like to read more! :-)
Aloha! Experience true Paradise in our SWEEET A-Frame Cottage located on the pristine Southeastern Shore of Molokai! You will have total privacy and seclusion on our tropical garden estate. You can see whales right off our coast and adjacent Honomuni Beach has been a refuge for the endangered monk seal. Check out pix at: http://www.molokaiparadise.com
We just received a GREAT EMAIL from Relationship Guru DR. LAURIE MOORE, who stayed at our SWEET beachfront COTTAGE for 2 weeks. Laurie has been on OPRAH and she said it was a wonderful vacation and that staying with us made all the difference. She loved watching the whales right off our coast, the stars and night, and the lights twinkling along Maui's coastline. Our caretaker Pastor is right on the property to answer all your questions about activities on the island, such as surfing Rock Point, visiting ancient Hawaiian altars, going to macadamia nut farms and coffee plantations, riding a mule down to Father Damien's Kalaupapa Peninsula, hiking up to the waterfalls in Halawa Valley, and checking out the Phallic Rock! You can find our website at:
http://www.molokaiparadise.com
Finally, there is a book of Kirby Wright poetry—including about ten poems explicitly about Hawaii—that allows us to see his artistic embrace taking in the mainland and the islands and life itself. In more than 60 poems and prose poems, he reaches beyond the edges and prods beneath the skin of places from San Francisco to New Jersey, always demanding and discovering meaning (or expressly not).
For Maui readers, the poems set in Hawaii like “At 33,000 Feet” and “Moloka‘i Budget Vacation,” may be the most immediately accessible, but every reader should give every poem in Before the City a hearing. Although much more of the islands remains in Wright’s world view than this, it can certainly be said that his special talent for seeing and naming the essence of a place is a talent born in Hawaii, in aloha ‘aina, the love of the land in which a person has roots and hopes.
Before the City: Collected poems and Prose Poems by Kirby Wright, Lemon Shark Press, San Diego, CA, 2003. $9.95, paperback, 101 pages, ISBN 0-9741067-0-4. (This review first appeared in THE MAUI WEEKLY, August 6, 2003).
Before The City: Collected Poems and Prose Poems
by Kirby Wright
Reviewed by
Joseph W. Bean, THE MAUI WEEKLY
Poet Kirby Wright may be familiar to some in Hawaii as the writer of “Aloha, Liliuokalani,” a plaintive poem distributed hand to hand at the Liliuokalani statue during the 100-year anniversary of the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. In it, the poet cries out to the long-dead queen that “Kapiolani is a park. Kaiulani is a hotel…” and “(n)ow Kalakaua is an avenue.” Wright says, “That poem went on to win the Robert Browning Society Award and Kapono was considering putting music to the words.” Maybe Kapono never wrote the notes on paper, but there is song enough in the words and in the feelings expressed. Any reader will hear the blue, persistent melody.
Another of Wright’s poems, “Punahou Reunion,” was recently shared at Final Senior Chapel, by the President of Punahou, with the school’s 2003 graduating class. Wright, obviously enough, is a Punahou graduate himself, and a poet of growing stature whose work has been published in many magazines, literary reviews and anthologies.