Second War in Hawai’i
John N. Miller
UNDER THE ALOHA TOWER
Where are the alohas of yesteryear—
the boat days, the Matsonia or Lurline,
the streamers and lei-sellers, Shirley Temple
stepping ashore, greeted by the Royal
Hawai’ian Band and Duke Kahanamoku?
A red-black D on its lone funnel,
the rusted ship nudging into Honolulu
harbor rainbows the green water’s surface
from a hole in its hull.
The city’s mayor, in black frock coat and top hat,
waits with three reporters. A few tourists
have pulled to curbside, studying brochures
on how to reach their Waikiki hotels
as corpses black, white, yellow, brown,
and those decayed to mottled poi-color
are brought to gangplank. On a litter borne
by two immense Samoans, a bony figure
in tri-cornered hat and blue coat
strains to rise.
“Relax, sir,” says the mayor.
“Welcome once more to our Islands.
I recognize you from your statue
in Waimea, Anchorage, and Christchurch.”
“Near
where my pilot died—the first of many
lost to the plagues and skirmishes attending
our explorations of the South Sea Isles.”
“And you, sir? I had thought you dead
two hundred years or more. Our aloha spirit
is known throughout the world, but largely
to the living.”
“I tell you, man,
death has been my medium
among Pacific islands, atolls,
archipelagoes. Death and dying
met us in Tahiti, where the French
of Bougainville had sown their spirochetes.
Where are the bougainvillea leis,
the garlands of pikake, yellow ginger,
white carnation or plumeria,
the graveyard flower?
Missionaries spread their pox and measles
with the word of God in island outposts.
And war, of course. War everywhere.
How many ships I’ve lost
through warfare!—this one, as you notice,
torpedoed in the Coral Sea.”
“O Captain, my good captain! Surely you don’t hope
to traffic in dead bodies. Here.”
“Perhaps. A Polynesian legend tells
of vessels designated by the gods
to ship the corpses of one island
to another—distant, mythical.
I’ve become part of the legend, vowing
to find that far-off island if pre-paid
in fruit and suckling pigs.
Can you tell me where I am?”
“You have discovered Honolulu, sir.
You see, behind me, the Aloha Tower,
years ago a landmark for the ships
and strangers visiting our paradise.
We are not heathens, Captain. We were told
how you were killed by uninstructed
warriors on the coast of our Big Island.
Regrettable. Now we know better
how to deal with human life and death.
Our Board of Health would not approve your cargo.
How is it that you’re here again, alive?”
“Beliefs die hard. And so long as so much
of the Pacific waits in darkness,
unexplored, my mission and the natives’ faith
keep me at the brink of death—
here, for my Second Coming.
Do you believe in faith?. A great war brought
white strangers, guns, supplies, munitions
to a Pacific land we call New Guinea.
After the war the white men left. A cult
arose, its priests proclaiming
that the white men would return
with the same wonders—airplanes, canned food,
beer, recorded music, bombs and rifles,
boots and metal hats. Like these white men,
I represent a living dogma,
not quite dead while I can carry off
the death that otherwise would haunt those islands,
and chart these oceans for the British crown.”
“Sir, you are gravely ill. I beg you
be our guest and spend your final days
in one of our world-famed resorts
with health spas, white sand beaches, gourmet food,
music and native entertainment.
Ha’ina ia mai ana ka pu’ana.
‘Pronounce it once more as the last refrain.”
But no unloading here. Our woes
have multiplied enough without more death
being brought into our world. May I suggest
that ten miles off from shore the sharks
would make quick work of any flesh you fed them?”
“Never! In exchange
for life-sustaining nutriment, I pledged
to ship these dead to solid earth.
My word of honor is at stake.
Besides, my voyage cannot end
until the Northwest Passage opens
to my prow. Bring me good Polynesians
who navigate these waters by the stars
and India will be our final stop
where all these corpses can go up in smoke
and I, too, die.”
ISBN 1-59661-029-8
71 pages/$15
Back cover copy:
Master of both the memorial and the pun, Miller begins his new book with a Pacific adjustment to the ubi sunt tradition: “Where are the alohas of yesteryear…?” His lucid narratives bridge the span between World War II in the Pacific, Miller’s own childhood in the Islands, and the “lost” paradise of present-day Hawai’i.…The poems serve as elegies and as rich, vital documents of a cultural presence insisting on its continuation, if not its continuity.
—David Baker
poet and poetry editor of The Kenyon Review
John Miller’s “Second War in Hawai’i” is a reach of words and loves that takes us with him toward his island youth and what he saw and felt but couldn’t understand, as no child can. Now Miller’s return in poems casts his prewar, wartime, and postwar Hawai’i in a glow of honesty, verbal precision, and human gravity.
—Dennis Trudell
author of Fragments in Us: Recent and Earlier Poems
(winner of the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry)
From where in American life John N. Miller’s poems come, they return us—where we did not know we’d come.… It is Hawai’i, before Pearl Harbor, or just after.… In the Second War crisis Miller’s poems would forestall, we are all returning to meet each other.… In the Second War of memory, the past stuns Miller across his tourist’s awareness into a reckoning of how the self’s words can tune us to the openings of a vowel. An extraordinary collection.
—Jeff Hamilton
editor of Delmar Literary Magazine
Though born in Ohio, John N. Miller grew up in Hawai’i (1937–1951) in various plantation towns and Honolulu. Earning his graduate degrees at Stanford, he wrote and studied poetry under Yvor Winters. He taught literature and creative writing for 35 years at his undergraduate alma mater, Denison University in Granville, Ohio, before retiring in 1997.