Footnotes to the Sun

By John E. Simonds

In this his second book of poetry, retired Honolulu and former Washington D.C. newsman John E. Simonds explores further experiences, travels, family milestones and personal encounters. Footnotes to the Sun pursues his interests in running and reflection, while also revisiting some compass points of life. A Depression era child of New England parents, he provides glimpses of youth in New York’s lower Hudson valley, early newspaper days in Indiana and Ohio, historic brushes in Washington, D.C., and mid-life to later years in Hawai’i. Four decades in ever-changing Honolulu have provided more than enough to examine, but Simonds also shares personal insights on pills and prayer in Manhattan, life changes over time, stress and serenity in the Pacific, family deaths in Connecticut and California, links to the past refocused by travel. Footnotes offers a range of verse forms—short pieces, detailed narratives, prose poems—sprinkled with dry humor from the East Oahu flood zone where Simonds has lived with his family since the 1970s, a few hundred yards from the Pacific, a natural neighbor that bears watching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491774618

John E. Simonds

John E. Simonds is a retired Honolulu newspaper editor who has lived in Hawaii for nearly forty years. His poetry has appeared in Connecticut River Review, Bamboo Ridge Press, Hawaii Pacific Review, and New Millennium Writings. He is the author of Waves from a Time-Zoned Brain. He lives with his wife, Kitty, on Oahu.

Book preview

Water and Light

Happy Hours

We run through a world of recovering people

proud of their problems

but unclear they’re over.

Their lives, like our jogging, one step at a time,

in parks by the sea

where the same sunset works.

If we’re breathing right as we train at dusk,

we can hear sharing

of time’s jointly-held glow.

Echoing aftereffects provide

resonant comfort tones

over sundown coffee.

Gentle throat-clearing baritones

say habits have left them

to mellow alone …

at least for today, of course.

Breeze from the park shore

stirs the overhead leaves

of the coco palm shade

and banyan tree vines

where we run without noise.

Thirsts unrequited,

some hungers have passed,

burned black as spoon bottoms.

Edging return

to circulation,

unfurled dollars showing

residues

of recognition,

rumbling in hoarse catarrhs.

Gentle

sounds of welcome greet

those in circled beach chairs.

Now

managed obsessions

come forth to reminisce

in whispers of experience at oceanside.

A late sun flashing

light on darkened waters.

The Times of Sand

                        Kailua Beach, Oahu

The poet Henry L.,

a sometimes waterfront guy,

real and earnest as his psalms,

was far ahead of me in Maine

and also on Kailua Beach,

along the Pacific, where he never ran,

but had it right about the sand,

the footprints, and the time.

Lives of fast men and women

all remind us that it’s still about time—

grains dropping through the hourglass

or flying from behind the footprints,

mine in sea-soaked Asics,

others barefoot showing toes and arches,

impressions that remind us

how our clock is moving faster.

How deeply clear the prints of small

determined toes stay formed in sand,

facing the approach of washing waves.

Once I ran these 4.4 miles

in under fifty minutes, wet shoes and all.

Now it takes more than an hour

on this long, sunny beach,

8:20 a.m. feeling like a downtown noon.

Beach-driven thoughts past dogs,

sunbathers, and oceanfront homes

may be more sublime than our own lives.

We follow the footprints of those

who’ve passed before us

(some young enough to be our children),

because the sand still holds them as our guide,

leading to an end of sorts at last.

Timekeepers applaud me at the finish

while someone laughs and says to hurry up.

There’s still some potluck left.

Key = mc2

                        Key West, Florida, 2013

I’m here to focus the sun

on moments that matter—

maybe memory squared,

if not with all facts,

at least new recognition

of a child’s time and space.

OK, so you’re saying someone

already did this at Princeton?

Originality is relative.

Equations keep finding new factors.

Ideas spring at us like neurons,

raising bursts of new questions.

How many in-laws can you invite

to the party before it explodes?—

my own riddle of relativity.

How many writers’ conferences

are needed to pulverize our atoms

of understanding—

our arcs and our echoes—

into recollections or re-collections

of matters that matter?

Windward Campus Sonnet

                        March 2013

The view from here is a vast, rising green.

Wood roses on vines burst open in gold.

Side lawn extends to a sloping ravine,

backdropped by mountains edged deep in their folds.

Our vision of surrounding Ko’olau

and closer grounds that roll to join the heights

requires more color than our words allow.

We gather all we can within our sights,

scanning the cypress, palms, and ironwoods,

and wish our eyes were strong enough to save

the sum of all the scenes and mindful goods

behind the colors of the flags that wave.

The wood rose blooming, falling, never done,

its grounded blossoms footnotes to the sun.

Tsunami Limbo

                        Honolulu, 2011

We drive to the hilltop

and wait for the sirens

in a roadside space with ocean view

across from a neighborhood school

ideally set for teaching on wooded high ground,

now closed for lack of students

(though new schools sprout elsewhere

and private ones bloom).

These days it stores an overflow

of public works and highway gear,

desks and space for city parks and street

department crews, an arsenal of hardware

occupying land meant for others.

In the dark we watch the ocean below

while focused on road-climbing traffic,

our oversized Volvo too big a car

(clothes and tax papers packed in the back)

for someone whose life mission

has powered down to a seawatch of care.

This is not a drill, but history has taught us

to expect an outcome of low-rolling

waves, lapping the unspectacular

ashore in our blessed flood zone,

neatly defined in phone-book maps,

covered each month by flood insurance

washing in and out with the mortgage tides.

Car radio seems a timeless echo box,

broadcast voices chorusing cautionary mantras.

We beside the former school know little

of risen water menacing Oahu shores elsewhere.

This March night our screens are swamped

with aerial footage of another nation’s nightmare,

Japan drowning in its own Pacific,

our family reunion flights there grounded,

other family flying home from Pago

in the dark about the airport here.

From a lamplit street, our space and time

seem distant from the urgent waves and disarray,

waiting for the all-clear we have come to expect.

Seventy and Mostly Sunny

Mother by nature lives here,

sharing her love with joy

and hard patience

in partly cloudy ways

with the threat of storms.

Big-city grandma,

small island grappler,

hot and crusty, sweet and sour,

smacking the tree to grow its coconuts.

She works for the weather people

as she lets them think.

Grandmother Nature’s agenda

barely abides NOAA’s arcs of survival

or its arch beliefs in its own

command of sea, sky, and ice.

She lets the policy steersmen

face the winds and