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Overview
In Coral Road Hongo explores the history of the impermanent homeland his ancestors found on the island of O‘ahu after their immigration from southern Japan, and meditates on the dramatic tales of the islands. In sumptuous narrative poems he takes up strands of family stories and what he calls “a long legacy of silence” about their experience as contract laborers along the North Shore of the island. In the opening sequence, he brings to life the story of his great-grandparents fleeing from one plantation to another, finding their way by moonlight along coral roads and railroad tracks. As his grandmother, a girl of ten with an infant on her back, traverses “twelve-score stands of cane / chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind,” Hongo asks, “Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of this history?” In fact, it is Hongo who guides himself—and us—as, in these devoted acts of recollection, he seeks to dispel the dislocation at the center of his legacy.
The love of art—making beauty in however provisional a culture—has clearly been a guiding principle in Hongo’s poetry. In this content-rich verse, Hongo hearkens to and delivers “the luminous and the anecdotal,” bringing forth a complete aesthetic experience from the shards that make up a life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780375712043 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2013 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Coral Road
I keep wanting to go back, across an ocean, blue-gray and uncaring,
White cowlicks of waves at the continental shore, then the midsea combers
Like white centipedes far below the jetliner that takes me there.
And across time too, to 1919 and my ancestors fleeing Waialua Plantation,
Trekking across the northern coast of Òahu, that whole family
of first Shigemitsu
Walking in geta and sandals along railroad ties and old roads at night,
Sleeping in the bushes by day, hàalelehana—runaways
From the labor contract with Baldwin or American Factors.
My grandmother, ten at the time, hauling an infant brother on her back,
Said there was a white coral road in those days, pieces of crushed reef
Poured like gravel over the brown dirt, and, at night, with the moon up,
As it was those nights during their flight, silver shadows on the sea,
It lit their path like a roadway made of dust from the Ocean of Clouds.
Michiyuki is what they called it, the Moon Road from Waialua to Kahuku.
There is little to tell and few enough to tell it to—
A small circle of relatives gathered for reunion
At some beach barbecue or Elks Club veranda in Waikiki
All of us having survived that plantation sullenness
And two generations of labor in the sugar fields,
Having shed most all memory of travail and the shame of upbringing
In the clapboard shotguns of ancestral poverty.
Who else would even listen?
Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of this history?
And what demiurge can I say called to them, loveless ones,
through twelve-score stands of cane
Chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind?
All is diffuse, like knowledge at dusk, a veiled shimmer in the sea
As schools of baitfish boil and revolve in their iridescent globes,
Turning to the olive dark and the drop-off back to depth below,
Where they shiver like silver penitents—a cloud of thin, summer moths—
While rains chill the air and pockmark the surface of the sands at Sans Souci,
And we scatter back inside to a humble Chinese buffet and cool sushi
Spread on Melamine platters on a starched white ribbon of shining cloth.
Table of Contents
Prologue: An Oral History of Blind-Boy Liliko'i 3
I Coral Road
The Festival of San Giovanni 9
Coral Road 11
Waimea-of-the-Dead 13
Pupukea Shell 16
Cane Fire 19
A Child's Ark 22
II The Wartime Letters of Hideo Kubota
Kubota to Miguel Hernández in Heaven, Leupp, Arizona, 1942 27
Kubota to Nâzim Hikmet in Peredelkino, Moscow, from Leupp, Arizona 29
Kubota Writes to José Arcadio Buendía 32
Kubota to the Chinese Poets Detained on Angel Island 35
Kubota Returns to the Middle of Life 37
Kubota Meets Pablo Neruda on the Street 39
Kubota on Kahuku Point to Maximus in Gloucester 42
III The Art of Fresco
Prologue 47
1 The Expulsion 49
2 Bathhouse, Hau'ula Beach Park 50
3 Tabula 52
4 Noli Me Tangere 53
5 Verdaccio for the Dead 54
6 Cane Fires 55
7 Baptism 56
8 The Apse of Apprenticeship 58
9 Roofscape 60
10 Preliminary Studies 61
11 In Memoriam 63
12 Giornata 64
13 Moana 65
14 Yeux Glauques 66
15 Soul's Leap 67
IV A Map of Kahuku in Oregon
Kawela Studies 73
Bugle Boys 75
Chikin Hekka 78
Holiday in Honolulu 80
55 82
A Map of Kahuku in Oregon 84
V Elegy
Elegy, Kahuku 89
Notes 97
Acknowledgments 101