A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Remembering his former failure to understand his father’s gardening (=preservation)
efforts, the speaker has come to appreciate his forebear’s “sense of green:” “I just want to
be able / to cup my hands in a clear stream” (75). If such thoughts remind readers of the
native Hawaiian concept of aloha’aina, this is not coincidental: being Local includes an
awareness of native culture, values, and spirituality. Thus, in his “Poem for George Helm:
Aloha Week 1980” the poet could perform a lucid examination of how the concept of
aloha has been exploited:
I believed when they said there are ways
in this modern technological world Oahu alone
could hold a million people
And we would become the Great Crossroads of the Pacific
if we used our native aloha spirit
our friendly wahines and our ancient hulas
They showed us our enormous potential
and we learned to love it
like a man who loves some thing in gold or silver
But these islands are made of lava and trees and sand (52).
In this poem, the use of the first person plural pronoun casts the poet as a native, and later
references to the ‘Great Mahele’ (“when they divided up / the home-land of a living
people”) and modern land and water access struggles (“we would still be able / to go up
the mountains, out to the country beaches”) reinforce this positioning. A few lines later,
though, the same “we” becomes the immigrants, searching for a personal paradise, lured
by the American dream:
the islands which remind us we’ve all travelled a long way to get here
We all wanted a garden of our own in the world
We believed we’d all have peace
(and a piece of the aloha and of the state if we worked for it)
We’re all pursuing the same dream!
Conflicting interests are merged by inclusive pronoun use. Finally, George Helm’s ‘aloha
spirit’ is invoked as an imperative for the present population of Hawai’i:
George Helm stroking towards a familiar beach
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