In heavy downpour,
blinded by somber clouds,
I stand on her high perimeter
imagining Halemaumau
far below, simmering
on the face of his mother caldera,
Kilauea, who, in 1967,
belched churning magma
from deep inside her volcanic body,
breaking through the hardened
crust to birth once again
her steaming son.
Now, I descend her green forest
shawl and enter the slumbering
landscape, where gray and
brown slabs recount
their pahoehoe history:
a twisting, heaving, popping
liquid inferno that cooled
into a still life of swirled meringue,
where steam spews from fissures
along razor-sharp edges
of ‘a’a lava, a story of smoked glass
shattered and strewn.
But regeneration tells its own tale
of hopeful impartiality: Seeds
wind-blown into her private spaces,
yield Ohia-lehua pioneers
that defy the cracked and heaved crust,
that rise from inhospitable crevices
to reveal blood red blossoms,
choice nectar of the ‘I’iwi,
one of the few survivors of this
Pacific archipelago’s
avian holocaust.
I move through
a dense curtain of pungent fog
to Halemaumau’s precipice,
his gaping maw streaked
black, copper, and white
adorned with gray cobbles.
I feel his torrid breath
and the power of devastation
held deep in his chest.
In the storm’s eye,
a striking stillness exposes
the paired forces
of destruction and renewal
and humanity’s choice
to mimic, assist, or impede
nature’s corollaries.
In the gray sky,
three white-tailed tropicbirds
circle slowly,
sentinels of light and resilience
above Kilauea’s distant rim.
Poem by Roxanne Bogart
Roxanne E. Bogart is a wildlife biologist and writer, whose poems have appeared in The Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Burlington Poetry Journal, The Silkworm, and Poetry Quarterly. She spends her personal time hiking in the woods and meadows of Western Massachusetts, where she gathers inspiration and momentum for her writing. She is a member of the International League of Conservation Writers, the Academy of American Poets, and the Florence Poets Society, and lives in Amherst, MA with her family. Find out more about Roxanne Bogart at roxannebogart.com