Ten thousand feet, love, and the air
is thin. The push and pull of puny
lung, the slow step. The eye
sweeps deep blue, the mother
cradling a sleeping babe. We
stand in the crater, the collapse
hundreds of years behind us,
the ash long settled to smooth
landscape, grays, mauves,
rust. A world come out of
destruction in the house
of the sun.
Standing here, we tempt the
timeclock, trust this moment
is not the one to coax fire
seeping to the surface, trust
the babe to sleep still. Our bones
splinter so easily, who are we to
reach this height? To feel the mist
of cloud cloak our skin. And isn’t it
the same question each time we
love? We are all soft tissue, always
verging on decay. Flinging ourselves
forward, grasping at sunbeams,
believing tomorrow
will come.
In Hawaiian, Haleakala means house of the sun.
Haleakala
Peggy Hammond’s recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Pangyrus, The Comstock Review, For Women Who Roar, Fragmented Voices, ONE ART, Burningword Literary Journal, Dear Reader, The Hyacinth Review, Boats Against The Current, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net nominee, her chapbook The Fifth House Tilts is due out fall 2022 (Kelsay Books). Find her on Twitter @PHammondPoetry.