War and Peace as Art: the poetry of Kathy Millhoff

One of my favorite poets is Kathleen Millhoff.  She grew up in Gary and Chicago, was my roommate for a while in Bloomington, IN and eventually moved to Guam with her husband and two small children.  Besides writing both poetry and short stories, she teaches in the Public School system in Guam.  Kathy is a true mentor, and one of my oldest and dearest friends.   From her I learned the fine art of growing up.

 Almost a Ghazal

Laughing at the last,

air travel brings us to a place unfamiliar.

The spinning globe splits shadows

of the pretentious, yet all too familiar.

We yearn for foods or words,

As long as we feel we are among the familiar.

We read of how a distant land broached a plan

Which we promptly refuse because it is not familiar.

Our travel now brings us to a place we know,

Where ice cream flavors and trees seem so familiar.

Yet we know ourselves to have a scent of change,

Our friends turn away as we are unfamiliar.

Please tell us if we feel unfamiliar,

We would not be a cause of anything too familiar.

But, no, once more a final call to arms,

And the laughter, the song, that was once so familiar.

Is it now wiped clean of blood and dirt that once more

It might appear the grace notes of one thing that might be named familiar.

CHANT

Rings,

night's song of sojourn,

and star-guided

we

join hands

to knit ourselves

a cloak

of certainty,

or a talisman

of shadow or tears.

Hold fast

the knit-purl

chain of remembrance,

for it will

light our way through

dark's

cloaking folds,

and bring

us

singing once more

to the

dawn.

--

NANA

(on december 8, 1941, japanese planes bombed the defenseless island of

guam, leaving it ready for the the invasion and capture.)

The grandmother rocks.

Old, her twig hands twine,

her caped shoulders hunch,

her grayed head swivels, jeweled ears twinkling,

her bright eyes suck in

she may not pass on.

Listen,

she might say,

beside that invading force

the people from across the Western sea,

they held us ransom for a price

they would not name,

they taught cutting cane

was preferrable to dying,

they buried us in our churches,

by our schools, in our fields.

We buried our radios in salt,

bulwark against the wider world.

Our Spanish sounding names

were hissed in our ears

Though we mouthed our Chamorro names.

The slaps we took were notes

for the dirge for this land.

We buried ourselves among the dead

to hide or escape

the living or the dead.

We married in secret,

any one, no one,

to escape the sale of ourselves.

We boiled a rat, a fly,

our own spit,

yet our children withered,

fell like broken leaves.

We learned that newer tongue,

not difficult,

we had learned

Spanish,

English,

scrolled it in the ruins

yet we buried the words of our mothers,

and have brought them out for sunning,

as taught,

and worlds all roll from our tongues,

and what is one more

language to us?

There may yet be those who bury themselves,

practice languages not their own,

who await needs not theirs,

bargains unredeemed.

Twined with us now,

a graced land,

and our names are chorused in our ears

chanted, chimed,

resounding.

This is what she may say,

if ears could hear,

clear away grit of passing years,

unclog notes of drizzling sameness,

unmask secrets camouflaged by media's dreary prose.