Garrett Hongo, “Under the Oaks at Holmes Hall, Overtaken by Rain”

Sometime during undergrad at Pomona College, I found excerpted on the fountain at the Smith Campus Center this poem. Its melancholy tone seemed an odd match for the sunny courtyard, but it resonated quite a bit with me, especially in the context of the pandemic.

In May 2024, I reached out to the author, Pomona alum and Pulitzer finalist Garrett Hongo, with some questions I had about the poem, and received a wonderful response. Noting the lack of a publicly accessible version online, I asked for permission to put it on my website; he graciously granted it. Someday, I hope to write some more about the poem and what it means to me, but for now, here is a full reproduction.

Under the Oaks at Holmes Hall, Overtaken by Rain
Garrett Hongo, 1999

A desert downpour in early spring,
and I’m standing under California oaks
gazing through rain as the grey sky thunders.
I don’t know why the nightingale sings
to Kubla Khan and not to me, nineteen
and marked by nothing, not even ceremony
or the slash of wind tearing through trees.
I don’t know why Ishmael alone is left
to speak of the sea’s great beast, why
the ground sinks and slides against itself,
why the blue lupines will rise and quilt
through the tawny grasses on the hillsides.
I can’t explain the garment of rain on my shoulders
or the sour cloth of my poverty unwinding
like a shroud as the giant eucalyptus
strips and sheds its grey parchments of skin
and stands mottled and nude in the shining rains.
I want something sullen as thundering skies,
thick as earthmilk, brown and sluicing
across the streets, grievous as the flood of waters.
I want unfelt sorrows to give away and wrought absence
to exchange for the imperfect shelter of these oaks,
for the froth of green ivy around my feet,
for the sky without gods and the earth without perplexity.
I want to have something like prayer to pay
or a mission to renounce as a fee
for my innocence under cloud-cover
and these furious nightingales of thunder,
companions of song in this untormented sea
of memory uncrowded with bliss or pain.

Written in 1999 for Pomona College, the poem appears:

• excerpted on the Smith Campus Center fountain and in full on a plaque in the campus center breezeway and on the building’s dedication
• in Pacific Coast Philology, on JSTOR
• in The Southern Review
• in Hongo’s collection Ocean of Clouds, forthcoming from Knopf, which will become the official source once it is published

and is given here with the permission of the author.