An Ocean of Clouds

The title poem of my new collection appeared in The New Yorker on June 2, 2025.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/an-ocean-of-clouds-garrett-hongo-poem

I sing for clouds, constant rains, a fern chorus
of things forgotten, ginger flowers
of sadness my mother bore, enormous
hollows of the family’s past, my father

the dutiful son come to run the store
by the volcano, called by his father
promising a new life, its open door
that swung shut after barely a year.

They left, me still a newborn in their arms,
wailing in complaint for the swift travel,
headed to Kahuku, the new truck farms,
old plantation, and its steel sugar castle.

I grew to six there, a boy barefoot
on dirt and gravel roads, green temple moss
by the graveyard. There were shorebirds in suits
of slanting rain, a gray-brown surf pebble-tossed,

not fit for swimming, a tired sandspit’s drift
that marked the margin of all our dreaming.
And what was that? The green folds of cliffs
chanted our imagined names, caught winds heaving

an ocean of clouds that piled like seawrack
muffling the mill’s whistle, windrows of rain
gathered upon the mountain’s emerald stacks,
the black crown of the day’s celebration.

Hidden within the sighing sugarcane, here
I first raised my voice in harmless praise.
I lifted my eyes to the moon’s white sphere
And sang a song I hoped would bless all my days.