Why I Chose the Title "Green Leaves" for My Selected & New Poems

When I was a boy, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, my favorite color was green. Myopic to the point that trees were fluffy balls on sticks, and watching television, once we bought one, was a drag of black, white, and blue, I was entranced by green. Green was a loud shout of joy in the narrow neighborhood streets, a carpet of blades for my little feet to blithely tread. Verdant and vibrant, green was a color I saw everywhere, and I got close, pressing my face to the lawn or to a Crayoned page.

Then, I got older, and got glasses, and like everyone over seven, I overlooked the most important features of existence. Now that I am a classic, sixty years later, green gleams for me again. In gathering poems for this volume, I noticed a sheaf of green within my greatest hits.

I love love, even love that colors outside the lines, so in “Lovers on Pūlehu Road,” I wrote the truck green--although I don’t remember the actual color. When I read the poem at the publication celebration, one audience member bought two copies of Lāhaina Noon, confiding to me in a whisper, “I know them.”

“The Wind Is in Your Face, The Breath is in Your Mouth,” one section of RattleSnake Rider, a poem of place and totem, expresses my expectation that at the moment I die, all of my books will burst into flame. I add my sincere wish: “let the fire lick everything not green away.” If the poems are not green enough to thrive, the words are not good enough to live.

In “Witnesses,” I nodded to the perishable permanence of life and poetry in a favorite line: Neither the sun/ nor the drought nor whatever chews holes in new green leaves/ can kill that tough stalk of thorns.” Yup, whatever survives will go on and go on without me or my words or you, for that matter. I can live with that.

Shih-te notes that we live in “a world of green rushes,” and I agree, one rush after another. In “A Million-Dollar Bill,” the broke but hopeful narrator creates his own legal tender, a “beautiful bill, green with patience and promise.” In “Watermelon Seeds,” my favorite wet, sticky, pink fruit is encompassed in “a smooth, striped rind in a green as deep as summer,” for as Black Elk observes, “The power of the world works in circles, and everything tries to be round.”

Closest to my heart is my first love poem for my wife, titled, “For Veronica, Instead of a Rose.” I, or my voice in the lines, has some explaining to do. To prove my love, I bring a poem instead of a rose, but with good reason: “I left the rose among green leaves.// Instead, I bring you these words,/ alive,/ just like the rose.” Alive, just like the rose, love must live. The same goes for poems, and the same goes for us all.

Enjoy my work.