The attendants greet me

with up-to-the-minute reports.

Mrs. Seki, bless her soul,

died last night of a heart attack.

Lucky, yeah?

Wish we could all

go like that.

— Something to Cheer About, from "Cloud Moving Hands"

When Hawai'i poet Cathy Song prepares a book, she writes for a specific period of time.

"It's a series of poems written from one point of time to another, and I say it's done," she says. "To me, they're all related because they're dealing with things I'm thinking about in a certain point of time."

Her fifth collection of poetry, "Cloud Moving Hands" (Pittsburgh University Press, $14) started when her mother entered a care home. Song tracked her decline, "and it kept broadening out, looking at the transitory nature of life and the things we cling to."

The result is a clutch of narrative poems of a time of life marked by change — by children leaving, parents dying, memories fading.

"There's always been that personal side (in my poems), but then again, I write narrative poems that I don't feel are personal from my life directly, but everything has to have been experienced somehow in my life," says Song.

From her early recognition as winner of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize, for her debut book "Picture Bride" in 1983, Song has become Hawai'i's best-known homegrown poet.

But instead of remaining on the Mainland in a hub of academia or publishing, she moved back to the Islands 20 years ago to raise her three children.

"It was never my goal to be this big famous poet," says Song. "It just kind of happened. I knew I always wanted to come back to Hawai'i, and the children just happened, and I wanted to be a big part of their lives. I was a stay-at-home mom, and I wrote."

While her children were napping, "I should have been napping, too, but I was writing," says Song. "It's amazing — I was able to write when I was so pressed for time. Now that they're gone, I don't write as much. It's really funny." Two of her children are in college, while the youngest is in high school. (Her daughter, Rachel Davenport, took the photograph used on the book's cover.)

In her poem "My Beautiful Daughter Calls to Tell Me It's Snowing," uses the imagining of her daughter following in her footsteps at Wellesley College as a jumping-off point to remember her own tough start, then transformation, at the school.

Song explores the many ways of being a daughter, a mother, a motherly daughter.

During the writing of this last cycle of poems, her mother passed away.

"She was ill for so long, it gave me a chance to almost document her decline," says Song. "She had dementia and was first in a care home, and then in a hospice. I think it would have been different had she died suddenly, but I had a chance to observe her for so long, it was almost her gift to us, because we did learn from that."

Had Song's mother died suddenly, says the poet, "she would have just been this photograph on the piano. I think more deeper insight would not have come forth."

And for her, the ultimate goal of poetry is to "transform suffering into awareness."

Reach Lesa Griffith at lgriffith@honoluluadvertiser.com.