The Human Touch 2013 - University of Colorado Denver

I Tano’ hu (my island)
Leslie Palacios Helgeson
The wonder of life, of being in and of earth
To a small child is measured in this--
Bigness, smallness, shortness, tallness
Cradled in the warm familiar hand of home
Memories, lined with reference to space
A sweet memory, blanketed in
“Oh I remember these, when I was small…”
In a place that I only see in my dreams
The other day, I stumbled upon a memory
Out of context, out of comfort
Out of reference, out of the ordinary
Satsuma oranges, with the leaf still attached
And how it threw me backwards in time
To a time and place you can hardly imagine
A tiny island, floating, discreetly
A spot of mass, far too humble to map
Zoom in, zoom in, zoom in
You’re over the Pacific Ocean
Zoom in.
You’re much too far away to see…
Fall through the clouds—nearer, nearly there.
Keep going, and closer and closer and close
Until, flirts of green and foamy splashes of surf
Along jagged edges of volcanic coast
Lilliputian land, captured, enraptured in time
Places like these don’t age like we do
The people on it live life in slow motion
The land itself, quickly eroding away
This paradox, Saipan. It’s been so long
Since having a proper old memory
Nostalgia and yearning are slow to affect…
For I have never been to a place like my home
Imagine, a small, skinny, bronze, brown-eyed child
Hair flying in salt-laced winds from the sea
Climbing (how the bark stuck in the soles of her feet)
A tall tangerine tree, towering, tickled with fruit
And greedily grabbed, by two tiny tough hands
Legs secured around the tremoring trunk
Success! And a rain of them fell from the sky
Dull thudding and rolling, then stopping and still
Grubby little thumbs poke into that soft fleshy spot
In the bottom of the thing that makes it so easy
And pulled apart, a soft cracking sound, the peel
As if it were made just for her
Sitting on the sandy earth, in around subtle hills
The red ants came, and bit and bit at her heels
The stinging, the burning, the itching it came
But could not perturb the sticky faced girl
And off to explore this gigantic world
She walked over coral that cut at her feet
To the place in the lagoon, where the volcano rocks
Jutted out, jocund, begging to be bested
Challenge accepted, and she waded her way
Between slithering eels and tufts of brown seaweed
To climb these mountainous outcrops of rock
Knowing that on them, she was closest to God
And after bloody fingertips and scratches all over
She stood, triumphant, treasuring the sight
A dark orange sun, setting on the horizon
And she felt so big and important and tall
PG 48
PG 49