Hawaii: Photography and Words

An island, I have said:
A peak, where fiery dreams and far desires
Are rained on, like old fires:
A vermin region by the stars abhorred,
Where falls the flaming word
By which I consecrate with unsuccess
An acreage of God’s forgetfulness,
Left here above the foam and long ago
Made right for my duress;
Where soon the sea,
My foaming and long-clamoring enemy,
Will have within the cryptic, old embrace
Of her triumphant arms—a memory.
Why then, the place?
What forage of the sky or of the shore
Will make it any more,
To me, than my award of what was left
Of number, time, and space?

— Edwin Arlington Robinson (excerpt from An Island, 1821)

He wonders what winter would look like in their yard — a mainland winter, a

Midwest winter. He imagines the leaves, smothered and torn the snow trampling the grass, stomping out everything until spring, the break in the sky, the blossoming, the pushing on…. We need seasons, he thinks…. Spring and hail, a little dying, a little budding, the works.

From House of Thieves, by Kaui Hart Hemings