Poetry

During my artist residency on Moloka’i, hosted by the Moloka’i Arts and Cultural Center, I wrote this poem about the loss of my sister; it was part of the healing process. On December 26, 2022, my beloved dinga’, my identical twin, Margaret Hattori Uchima drowned in a tragic accident, after being swept beyond the reef in Alupang Cove, Guam. We were 57 years old. Identical in virtually every way as children, we grew to look different as adults, but our voices remained identical. We were echoes of each other, in fact, I hear her in my voice, especially when I am mentoring students and staff, saying things I know she did say or would have said to her students and staff as Dean of the School of Health at the University of Guam. This poem is done in the style known as Echo Verse or Echo Poetry where the end of one line is echoed in the end of the following line. Here it is performed by Val Cole, Wildsound Festival: GRIEF Poetry Reading: Echoes of Margaret, by Mary Therese Hattori

Here is a video of the poem Fuetsan Famalåo’an: An Anthem to Women, published in the “The Value of Hawai‘i 3: Hulihia, The Turning,” an open access text, a project of the Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities and the Center for Biographical Research.

My dear friend Michael Q Ceballos of Twiddle Productions, took this video of my poetry reading at the Hawai’i Books and Music Festival: