This week I am thinking of our recent trip to Hawaii. We spent some time visiting A's brother Miq and his wife, the inimitable Penny (visiting family is a good excuse for trips to exotic locales!) and then we also took half the vacation to island hop about on our own and explore. We came to Hawaii for our honeymoon ten years ago so we were returning after a decade to not only enjoy the tropical breeze but also to remember where we started and celebrate having made it this far, back in a kind of grand circle. It was kind of a family vacation/second honeymoon/relative visiting trip...just a little of everything in there.
It was fun to go back as a painter. I feel like it changes the way I see so much of life...I notice amazing colors, the way light glows along an edge, and the soft quality of the air in a vista. One of things that really has stayed in my mind was the fruit. Its a beautifully agricultural and lush place so there's no shortage of ripe, juicy, glistening fruits everywhere. The fruits we have here are equally lovely really, there's just something very fresh about things you don't have where you live. This is what I am remembering now as the weather crisps and blusters outside our house and December looms large.
A Ripe Visit
Staying in their teak, jungle bungalow
Was beautiful, like the breakfast papaya:
Glistening crescents of spoon-soft gold;
Florals melting into the walls of your mouth.
They smiled easily and shared their croquet set,
The balls rolling into a dip under the banana tree.
Life there was warm and soft, rippling onward.
We stripped magenta ramubutans slowly and read
Languid stories to the children about dragon gold.
I got up one morning with the roosters and
Watched dawn rise over corrugated metal to the
Nutty snap of a longan skin between my teeth.
We made outings like good vacationers do
To Chinatown for highlighter pink dragonfruit
To a local farm stand for starfruit with a song
Like a raspberry catching the crest of a sunset.
And to the pineapple plantation where the fruit
Rises like trophies out of a vast plain of thorns.
We picked guavas in a baking crater and ate them
Dripping juice on the gearshift in the front seat.
We found one wild lilikoi, plump and dangling from
Vines tangled with lipstick, wild fuchsia blooms.
That night when we sawed it open at the table
And passed around sips of the jellied seeds
They told us about a friend's newborn daughter
Improbably named after the passionate little fruit.
On the last morning of our visit, hustling for the plane
We ate breakfast together standing in the kitchen
Scooping up avocado flesh with spoons
And then hurling dripping mango into our mouths.
Desperate to eat up paradise before our flight.
We drove out of their bouncing lane and
Saw them framed by an enormous santol tree
Wrapping his arms around them in the sun.
Our host today for Poetry Friday is Amy over at The Poem Farm. Please drop by and savor some of the other contributions if you find yourself sitting with a mug of tea on Saturday morning in a quiet hour. A little poetry does a body good.
Have a beautiful weekend!
