ORCHID LEIS AND LIES
She wanted an orchid garden—
Hawaiian cattleyas, lavender vanda;
wanted to see her children and grandchildren grow,
kept reassuring them, “I’ll be home soon.”
She wanted an orchid garden—
‘okika honohono, and enough blooms to make a lei;
to lay beneath her Hawaiian orchid quilt
and wake up to the aroma of fresh Kaʻū Coffee.
She wanted an orchid garden since her 51st birthday
when we bought her orchids, later promising
we’d water them, and they’d be waiting
in her patio; purple orchids of perpetual bloom.
Final days of wanting— orchids moved to the ICU,
I slept on the floor near the elevator, near other people
with the same expression—
people waiting for people wanting orchid gardens.
I went back to her old floor where her nurses
gave me a towel, a pillow, and another lie
as I entered the empty waiting room to sleep on the couch,
“Everything is going to be alright.”
This poem is from the chapbook Patsy’s Gingerbread Fantasy by Darlene M. Javar (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/patsys-gingerbread-fantasy-by-darlene-m-javar/
Patsy’s Gingerbread Fantasy, set in multicultural Hawaii, includes poems of ohana, resolve, and perseverance, aloha transcending time and place as a family endures and grieves for losses across decades. Layers of meaning unfold through carefully depicted images and scenes centered around a mother whose grit and passions are timeless. The reader is emersed in culture, country, and coffee as he/she travels to rural Pahala Town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Punaluʻu Beach during a tidal wave, Queen’s Medical Center on Oahu, and a kitchen filled with gingerbread house candies, nutmeg, turmeric, anise and lucky bottom fish to steam on the barbeque grill.
Darlene M. Javar, a retired educator/principal, relishes her rural life in Ka’u, Hawaii. She has a new-found appreciation for time—time with the mo’opuna (grandchildren), time with the aina (the land—that which feeds), and time for poetry. Patsy’s Gingerbread Fantasy is her first chapbook collection.
The Paddock Review 