My Room

My room is narrow:
A few books, and a bed.
To the bath, as well,
A sedentary stumble.
On both sides of high walls
Lie two grassed paths;
Even my lot is small:
The only way to tell
How vast the squall
Is to look straight ahead.
And yet, a bed, a bath:
Whose world more spacious,
Whose sky more rimmed
With palms, whose path
More strewn with hope,
More frangipani’d than mine:
A modest room, still, to breathe
Miracles in, and brine.
By day the sky trades mist
For distant thunder;
By dark whole crews teem
To charm me in the garden,
No wonder spared, no dream
Missed—just ocean yowling
On its one last stand.
In the end, not a sound lost
In these isolated lands,
No matter how slight:
Not on the sea, the reach,
Or in the trees, the wind,
Or in the night, the beach.

December 13th, 2021, 3:15 a.m.
Kaiholu

December 15th–23rd, 2021
Kailua and Kaiholu