Portside

-For Kyle & Auntie Terri

Every year, more than a million tourists march
through military museums, memorials & ghostly

battleships as "Remember Pearl Harbor" echoes
with patriotic fervor. But what if we learned

"Ke Awalau of Pu'uloa," the Hawaiian name for this
sacred place, where pristine watersheds once flowed

to the sovereign sea, once birthed an estuary teeming
with spawn, fish, oysters. What if we praised

Ka'ahupãhau, who, in the form of a shark, protected
the harbor for generations? What if we recognized

the reciprocity between sugar profits, white capitalists
& the sharpened edge of a bayonet constitution?

Would we recite every name on the Kū'ē Petition
to finally hear the true history of the overthrow

& illegal annexation? Would January 17, 1893, live
in infamy? What if we were given a free map

of PACOM (Pacific Command)? Would we feel
its eyes & tentacles surveilling & strangling

36 countries (half the world's population)?
What if we hiked to all 700 toxic Superfund sites

in Pearl Harbor, and enjoyed a picnic of wild caught
seafood from these contaminated waters? What if

national & state parts didn't simply preserve
the myth of American innocence, but actually told

the truth about American empire? Would we finally return
these stolen places to their native stewards?

Could these tributes to colonial power
become healing testaments of peace?

Craig Santos Perez writes, "One of the major themes of Pacific poetry is militarization and its impacts on native islanders and the environment." The many toxins and chemicals associated with warfare that are present in Hawaiian waters continue to negatively affect marine and human life.