Poems

Tracy Chan is a journalism major at UHM, and current Associate Editor of Kalamakua. She has been writing poetry for ages and ages, and likes using patterns of words to describe the beauty and craziness of the world she sees.

A Haiku Triad

~
The moon over glass
A shifting tide of many
Lights amid the sea.

~
Urban shadows rise
black and gold soliloquoys
Beneath the quiet palms.

~
The ocean shimmers
In plate glass and steel mazes
Twilight shadows wake.

Conversations with a dying age

Earth and sea, and fiery sky

and something in between-

the grey of mist, of mystery,

desire to fill the longing

deep within

for a melancholy born of sadness

and of strength.

Beyond the flood

the night has passed-

argent waters light my path

quiescent drops of eternity

they pulse, divine.

Regain the pain of bleaker times,

Recall the siren song of fear

the will to fall and never rise

the fight to lay, face down,

forget and drown.

Grey dust, like water clouds my eyes

my nose, my ears, my mouth.

Cease fire and blood, and still

the molecules are here;

engaged, tenacious, greedy mind,

an entity infused with doubt,

it floats in caustic disarray;

beneath the omnipresent waves,

A sky conceived in memory

And shipwrecked in the distant past

Calms the turmoil of the seas,

And once fulfilled, begins to fade.

El Laberinto de Sueños

A lullaby
Creeps loud and clear,
Its subtle resistance
Aching in my mind;
Sweet notes of sadness
Long defined
Inside a child's breast,
Take wing, and sing
And let the shining embers soar
Into the frail autumn sky.
The gold of heartache filters through,
The red of blood runs pure;
Through such tragedies endured
A voice is found
For fantasies of dusky myth
And swirling light
Defined with innocence and dust
As we alight to dream...

Edification

Crystalline towers
Rise around
An arc of stone and steel and glass
Beneath the soaring rays of dawn
Faces turned against the past
But nothing lasts.
Mezzanine seduction
Grown under the street
This is where the future lies
So many miles above my feet.
Imposing mass, electrified
But silence flies
Robotic wings and lines long deaf
Wrapped up, alone, impervious
To beauty, pain, the feats of men
No passion left to break the calm
Over my head
The breakers from a million oceans crash
And dissipate, as throngs of frenzied lives
Are lived and died within the wires.

Evolution of a Dream

The invasion spreads,
Creeping over synapses;
Neurons fire and replicate
From a time before
The walls of her single cell
Were lined with shrouds.
Quicksilver branches
Become arms and legs,
And screams emerge.
Aeons later, the first ripple
Of a face appears inside her mind,
Sterile, voiceless, cold.
Emotions will come later.
The primordial flux
Of being one frenzied apparition
Locked up in time,
Reflected from desks and walls
And glowing screens.
She yields; she has no choice
And from a stranger, longer night
Evolves the dream.

The Fisherman's Wife and the Octopus

She embraces
The eight arms of her lover,
Cold flesh against her own
As accidental caresses
Brush, sinuous
Against her burning brow.
She gathers close
With ardent sighs,
Surrenders trembling thighs
To the serpentine appendages,
The salty kiss;
And snakes one pale, slender hand
Around her object of desire. 

(Note: "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" is an erotic woodcut of the ukiyo-e genre made around 1820 by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai...and later converted to a painting.)