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That Morning

      They had named the battleships for states:

      Arizona
      Pennsylvania
      West Virginia
      Nevada
      Oklahoma
      Tennessee
      California
      Maryland

      They called them “she”
      as if they were women
      (gray metal women),
      and they were all there that morning
      in what they called Battleship Row.

      Their places
      (the places of the gray metal women)
      were called berths.

      Arizona was at berth F-7.
      On either side, her nurturing sisters:
      Nevada
      and Tennessee.

      The sisters, wounded, survived.
      But Arizona, her massive body sheared,
      slipped down. She disappeared.

Rainbows

      It was an island of rainbows.
      My mother said that color arced across the sky
      on the spring day when I was born.

      On the island of rainbows,
      my bare feet slipping in sand,
      I learned to walk.

      And to talk:
      My Hawaiian nursemaid
      taught me her words, with their soft vowels:
      humuhumunukunukuāpua'a
      the name of a little fish!
      It made me laugh, to say it.
      We laughed together.

      Ānuenue meant “rainbow.”
      Were there rainbows that morning?
      I suppose there must have been:
      bright colors, as the planes came in.

Aloha

      My grandmother visited.
      She had come by train across the broad land
      from her home in Wisconsin, and then by ship.
      We met her and heaped wreaths
      of plumeria around her neck.
      “Aloha,” we said to her.
      Welcome. Hello.

      I called her Nonny.
      She took me down by the ocean.
      The sea moved in a blue-green rhythm, soft against the sand.
      We played there, she and I, with a small shovel,
      and laughed when the breeze caught my bonnet
      and lifted it from my blond hair.

      We played and giggled: calm, serene.
      And there behind us—slow, unseen—
      Arizona, great gray tomb,
      moved, majestic, toward her doom.

She Was There

      We never saw the ship.
      But she was there.

      She was moving slowly
      on the horizon, shrouded in the mist
      that separated skies from seas
      while we laughed, unknowing, in the breeze.

      She carried more than
      twelve hundred men
      on deck, or working down below.
      We didn’t look up. We didn’t know.