Pipe Lines of Kaimu: Heading Out

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Poetic Form: Narrative

Inspired: 2023 November 26

Image: Swimmer Slicing the Curl by Private Photo

A dawning twilight's me. Oh, joy. Oh, what a joy. This day. Oh, what a day. A breath bestills my eyes and I, e'er slight, a deeper breath that reopened them and myself to a blessed pleasing. All the while, the barking, the barking, it goes on, with the rattling chains and their forgiving little houses, shaking, and shaking, of woods nailed beneath renails of assurance. I held to a softening within me that turned my soul and me, to gaze upon whimperings and forever constant wags of white, brown, gray, and black tails. "I'm going holoholo guys, so I'm off, totally off!"I said to them, and in the turning of me, a final say, "Take care of grannies!" So off I went to that other constant beyond the homestead. Needless to say, the noisy crescendos of barking constants my rear. The waves, the waves. That pounds away at the canoe cliffs, that we call, 'King's Landing'. It's a crag, a rock cliff that juts upwards, separating the lowlands, where lies Kalapana village and our home. You can see the cliff from our place, but not only the cliff. Most times, the pounding waves that can be heard at the house, can also be seen there too, particularly, when it's high tide, and when a storm front is moving inland. That happens a lot here. Up I go on our dirt driveway. It's unpaved, but it's a short walk from the house. Between our home and King's Landing is Kalapana village. Not much there, except our two churches, and a recent drive-in, store, and post office. Well, it's just a stand outside the store with a bunch of mailboxes next to the large letter-drop mailbox. My cousin who works in the store, is sort of a mailman. Besides taking care of the store stuff for the villagers and other customers, the postal thing he does is selling stamps and envelopes and nothing more. He catches the school bus with us, --my cousin, I have a lot of them, --cousins. As I was heading up our dirt driveway, with the village just up a bit, I stopped to pluck a ripe guava off a tree and a few raspberries from the shrub bushes nearby. Guava trees spread outwards when they grow. Their bark and branches are durably strong and they're great for climbing. Though their branches arch a bit and bend about every which way that makes the climb itself to be very challenging, but fun. Our family cut away at them because they'll get too big alongside our dirt driveway. Still, there are a lot of them that stretch out from the driveway on the front side of the home. The raspberry shrubs in the wild can get very wild and tangily where they become useless as far as yielding berries because they'll cross their branches a lot, and they'll crisscross themselves to a pokey nuisance, which will get them chopped up and burned. Yes, our raspberry bush variety which grows alongside our driveway and beyond--does have thorns. I reached the uppermost part of our dirt driveway. The house is in the lower part of the village. It's more like a one-sided ravine, with one side being a rock embankment which the village is sitting on, and then there is our house, and behind us is that other side of that so-called onesided ravine. That would be several coconut groves where a bunch of coconut palm trees grow close to each other and there are a lot of groves that dot that side of the house. There are many mangoes and guava trees too, and other trees like the Norfolk pine, and the Lau Hala tree known as the Screwpine tree. Its leaves are pokey--thorny, and Hawaiians weave stuff like hats and baskets, and animals too. Well, it's the layout of the land here in Kalapana where the town sits. It's not noticeably high, like maybe the height of two of me. Sometimes, I get to be unnoticeable too.

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