Aki Sitting on the Crater at Raraku

by Brian Doyle

Let’s say a reiki healer called Aki makes a haiku at Raraku.
And, for once, let’s not go any further at all with this poem.
Let’s just stop right there and not arrive at any conclusions.
Let’s just happily contemplate the absolute Akiness of Aki,
The tart wind off the ocean whipping the pages of her diary
So that she has to maneuver her whole left arm to pin them,
And just as she calculates syllables for the seventeenth time
One of the enormous statues below her, the legendary moai,
Topples over, face first, and plunges its immense schnozzle
Into the dense ancient soil with the faintest plop! imaginable.
There’s a split second that could be said aptly to last forever,
During which dust swirls and an albatross is vaguely curious,
And that seems like a really excellent place to end this poem.
We’ll never know if Aki leaps up and runs down to the moai,
Or if she just sits there astonished up on the rim of the crater,
Or if she starts to scribble another poem altogether, or maybe
She gets all totally absorbed in the albatross, I mean that bird
Is the size of a biplane, and how often do you get to see that?