Lahaina is burning in a sunny café 

Where I sit facing the marketplace

Of a small old town in Germany,

My screen open in the foreground

With flames twisting and waving

In the wind as a woman picks up 

Her espresso over there and the people walk

By outside, opening like flowers

To the sun after weeks of fall rain

In the summer-

This land where I sit was razed 

And passed back and forth like a tarnished coin

In the Thirty Years’ war, 

Even the church has arrow slits

Blankly waiting

Above the pleasure seekers on the square.

Most of a lifetime ago I was in Lahaina

Where one day in a shop on the ground floor

Of a wild-west building 

My parents dug into their wallets

For the money to buy a surreal teeshirt

with a cat singing and playing guitar;

Looking down again at my screen I see

That same street,

That building with a second-floor balcony

That used to have a store on the bottom floor

Dancing in flames, 

Gone already even as I remember it, sitting here.

Back home, I wore that shirt for years, 

Until it was too holed and tattered

Even for jogging out past the browning hills

Into the country.