Garrett Hongo: California Poets Part 10, Three Poems

Garrett Hongo

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Garrett Hongo

Three Poems

A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER ON HER SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY

The bent disc of a three-quarter’s moon

shines through a black wrap of clouds,

      silver-edged,

casting its pearly road over the sea,

and I gaze back seventeen years

under the long stream of stars from Cassis

to my daughter’s birth, fortune of my late life.

Each of her days, I have heard the bawl of sea-wind,

have recalled every hour we spent on every shore

since Kawela was her making—the drapery of ironwoods

and funiculars of coconut trees at the top of the beach.

I have imagined all curling waves to come,

all their dancing under a sponsoring sun.

Sea turtles in a brimming lagoon attended her there.

Mullets finned above striated sands on the bay’s bottom.

Egrets stalked the tideline and sharks in iridescent exile

Made lazy, looping patrols just outside the reef. 

In Venice, when she turned four, she asked to cross

the Bridge of Sighs so she could picture Casanova’s escape,

measure the dive to the murk in the canal below.

Her eyes gleamed, delight rising over the epicanthic drape. 

At San Zaccaria, under a light rain, she struck a kabuki pose,

one foot forward on the slick stones, her torso compact,

a souvenir umbrella on her shoulder, leaning back,

its muted colors a sepiaed bloom as it twirled. 

By thirteen, hands thrust through tadpoles in a pond

had faded in fascination, and a narrow street of thrift-boutiques

was her new Mecca—a throng of teen fashionistas

shuffling counter-clockwise like Tik-Tok penitents,

while I swam, father without drip, against that stream,

exiting the déluge fantastique like a cormorant.

She marveled at cheap dresses, pink Afros of cotton candy

spun on a dream of paper cones, 

and the café where a hedgehog pulsed in her hand. 

I can still see her moon-face rising from a dandelion’s spray,

feathers of seed blown across a vineyard by Tuscan winds,

and I find myself I hoping the world will be her proving field

where the vague cosmologies of her heart might find their truth,

the halo at her head gladdened and made a gentle shield.

For her, I’d like the days to come to be spreading coral tree,

a splendor of petals red and upturned to the sky,

that may she live a flower of the sea, a yellow hau

growing to a sunburst of orange in the day’s last hour,

a cloister of reunion that is a fluid memory

under what will have become its own eternity.

MEDITATIONS NEAR THE WILLAMETTE RIVER

1.       My House

I came to this house at the south edge of town

Just three years ago, having lived here over thirty,

Moved from Volcano, its mists, ferns, and ʻōʻhia forests.

I’d thought the climates similar—rain forever,

The constant chill and dampness driving one indoors,

Taming the soul’s tumult, sequestering for contemplation.

Yet for years I refused joy and took to griping instead,

A discontent raging in the supermarket aisles

Too unsettled to resist the samsara of the world as Unreal,

Failing to meditate on the earth’s glorious shadows,

The obscure that would transform what is brazen into gold,

The plain re-envisioned as prefigurements of the mind’s light.

But the new place swam in my sight with a pure abundance:

Purple crocuses and yellow dandles of daffodils in the spring,

The laughing violet lips of irises bloomed in the sideyard,

And a dogwood tree adorned itself with quartets of white fans.

Out back there were mats of creeping thyme and ajuga by the rock wall,

And, under twin redwood trees, great with a green shade,

A hydrangea bush with pale bouquets turned to lavender

And rhododendrons put up elaborate candelabras of lipstick red.

Wherever I looked, I’d a calypso show of flamboyant blooms.

These daily bucolics changed the core of my moods.

I’d never cared for fancy living quarters much,

Had functional houses without gardens most of my life,

But here I noticed sycamores, oaks, and Douglas fir

On the terraced hillside rising at the back of my property,

That a mottled morning light fell on all fours on the lawn.

I bathed in the cicatrix of shadows under the russet leaves of momiji

And heard the churrs and pipings of a thrush, a crow’s caw,

And the murmurous chant of waters in the creek bed. 

I dressed my floors with spendy Turkish carpets,

lined a dining room wall with a friend’s huge photographs

That looked like Chinese landscapes in subtle washes of ink,

Black and amber, black and sienna, black and russet brown.

Instead of a living room, I built a library

And put up bookshelves filled with poetry,

A phalanx of family photographs across their tops.

In a corner, I placed the family shrine dedicated to Kubota,

his soroban alongside a mokugyō wooden bell,

And, on a shelf below them, an image of the Buddha,

A collection of stones, a Hopi rattle, and pottery shards,

From the high desert around Leuppe, his prison of three years.

Something healed, and I felt retired to satisfactions,

An Horatian place of refuge that was my own Sabine farm

Where I might write epistles, contended and advisory, to the young,

Celebrating my own leisure, the consolations of my late life.

2.      My Desk

I chose a thick slab of smoked glass,

Had it beveled on the edges,

Laid it upon a welded steel frame

Of an old dining table—

Thick, squared struts and a trestle underfoot—

And made of them a writing desk

I felt near as elegant as one

Lucky for me once in the Maranese at Bellagio.

Above it, on the left, I hung a small painting,

A Zen ensō done in a circling cloud of brushed ink

Done by an old friend who’d studied in Kyoto.

Across from it, I placed a photograph,

Taken by his wife, of a great poet,

Slim and lanky, dressed in work clothes,

A milk pail of ashes swung in one hand,

An impassive expression on his face.

Modest man, lyricist of earth’s splendor

And heaven’s promise, I call you maestro.

Your words are my guide to the mysteries,

The sweet dazzlements of nothingness,

The zero’s emanations, the rose that is the prism

Of all invisible lights come from the Everlasting.

In the photo, your eyes squint across the silent dust,

Gleaming motes in orbit over my desk,

And I think to envision fiery mandalas

That are the aching heart’s yearning,

Seven Immortals joined by the silken string of our reckoning,

All souls’ changes in the cosmos an embroidery of imagination.

3.       Kubota’s House

I’ve a curling black and white of Kubota

Kneeling on the crest of an unfinished roof,

Bossing his two sons and my father

Hammering shingles on crossbeams below him.

He was building his own home in Hauʻula,

On Kamehameha Highway near Hawaiian Homelands.

Half would be a residence, half my grandmother’s diner.

His house before belonged to the sugar plantation.

It was a sprawling bungalow of many rooms

Next door to the general store he ran for Castle & Cooke. 

It sat for years alongside a dirt road lined with palms

Before they widened and paved it, making an asphalt promenade

So cars could drive directly to the Mormon Temple,

The white central building and its wings

A constant image filling every windshield.

My parents rented, a former luna’s place in Walkerville,

Once the area of Kahuku for whites only--

Japanese caneworkers not allowed.

My great-grandmother’s place was a shotgun

Across a sandy, humped car-lane from the Bestu-In,

Her front-yard garden planted with rows of melons,

Cukes, bean stalks, tomatoes, and papaya trees.

She grew more than half her food.

She paid for only rice, meat, and miso.

Inside were a bed with an army blanket,

A table and benches as for a cafeteria,

Two bamboo easy chairs and a lacquered shrine,

Curls of incense laddering to the ceiling.

We started from plantation shacks,

Structures of bare wood silvered by weather.

But I ended up here, my house of refuge

Carefully contrived with exotic furnishings,

A sixties manse surrounded by mature plantings.

A hummingbird copters by the rose outside my study’s window

And a dazzle of sunlight escapes through the redwood’s lowest bough.

IN MY OWN TEARS

Back only a week, still antic, a raincloud

Pin-cushioned like Saint Sebastian by arrowing winds,

The solace I pursued elusive as the morning dun

That emerges, imago released from its disguise,

Prefiguration to the brilliant, momentary flight.

A launchboat buffs the rough turquoise of the sea

And a misericordia of scurf glistens in its wake

As the long day discards its body of clay.

Author Bio:

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai‘i, on May 30, 1951. He attended Pomona College

and the University of Michigan. He received his MFA in English from the University of California, Irvine.

Hongo’s collections of poetry include Ocean of Clouds (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025); Coral Road: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); The River of Heaven (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Yellow Light (Wesleyan University Press, 1982). He is also the author of The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai‘i (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), winner of the Oregon Book Award for Nonfiction.

Hongo’s other honors include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2022, he received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review.