Beached: Poetry written and performed by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner

Kathy is a Marshall Islander poet, performance artist, educator. She received international acclaim through her poetry performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. Her writing and performances have been featured by CNN, Democracy Now, the Huffington Post, NBC News, National Geographic, and more. In February 2017, the University of Arizona Press published her first collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.

Text
and if the documents are true then even the whalers
avoided us. they slid past these islands, whittled
without rivers from gods living in shallow trunks of ni.

whales were hunted for the simplest pleasure - a light
and meat. greenlandic hands offer me whale the same way
i am offered turtle back home - in tradition,

in ceremony. how conquerors stripped the sacred,
left a soured carcass of commodity. simple pleasures
plundered and masticated. destruction takes

many forms - persistent floods besiege us from all sides
even here, in this meeting. we cross and crisscross an ocean
of documents meant to charter an unfiltered future. destruction

takes the form of bolded words :
Decides
Urges
Requests
three abysmal sounding lines for compassion

in august whales die in maui without hawaiian hands
to soothe them into soft darkness. if it was a marshallese
shoreline the beached whales would signal a chiefly death -

harbingers of loss and damage. cost analysis of disemboweled
paperwork. how do we decide the proper response to a room
full of sharks in suits. they can smell the brown in our blood,

the native in our speech. they offer thickets of false solutions,
strategies without navigational aides. i spent the meeting
searching for the simplest pleasures - you, a light to guide

the thin meat of my paper heart. i could interpret your movements
less than our enemies on all sides. over and over i asked you
to decide your position. i urged you to reassess your motivations.

i stood naked as a shoreline,
requesting the simplest pleasures.

Credits
Edited By Andrew Suzuki
Music and Sound Design Laughton Kora

Mana Moana Pasifika Voices 2022
Mana Moana – Pasifika Voices is a collection of artistic video works, created to amplify and support the Pacific to drive global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This collection is the second in a series that began in 2021.

These poems have been gathered from our Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa to reflect the voices and experiences of our past and present Poets, many of whom include the giants of Pasifika poetry.

Mana Moana - Pasifika Voices is supported by Aotearoa New Zealand and coordinated by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and Storybox, with the support of Pacific Islands poets and artists, to amplify the Pacific voice at COP27.

Series Credits
Special Curator Poetry - Audrey Brown-Pereira
Directors/ Mana Moana Curators - Rachael Rakena, Mike Bridgman
Executive Producer - Rob Appierdo
Producer - Amanda Walker
Music Direction - Laughton Kora
Music Composition & Sound Design - Laughton Kora, Tiki Taane, Mona Sanei
Sound Engineering - Tiki Taane

Made with support from Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, Massey University
Produced by Mana Moana and Storybox.

Thanks and acknowledgement to everyone involved in creating these works.

Mana Moana Pasifika Voices is supported by Aotearoa New Zealand and coordinated by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), Mana Moana and Storybox, with the support of Pacific Islands poets and artists, to amplify the Pacific voice at COP27.

Full credits are at the end of each video
Links
www.sprep.org
https://www.manamoana.co.nz/pasifikav...