Poems from SLO County residents celebrate National Poetry Month | Week 1
Welcome to The Tribune’s 15th annual celebration of National Poetry Month. Throughout April, The Tribune will share the works of poets countywide selected from among more than 200 submissions.
As your current poet laureate, I have chosen this first sampling of poems by adults.
I assure you, I read, lingered, and agonized over every choice I made. A great theme seemed to emerge as I read these poems: the impermanence of time, and how arbitrary everything seems to be. Moments, joys, expectations, knowledge, love, pain, and death — all of these experiences seem to be so temporary. The poems talk to us about things that echo something internal to all of us — a longing for something, the loss/grieving of something, the drive to become something. And this something is change.
Everything in life and death is change. Read these poems, then read them again and listen. They recognize and honor change.
Marguerite Costigan, San Luis Obispo County poet laureate
Arterial
When stars bleed
their final evanescence,
they drop
like glitter bombs
into open hands
of sprouting children.
Shards of dying light
deemed too dim
to be useful,
but glimmering hope
resides, seedlings
the youth sow inside
their darling souls.
By the pulse of time
from their own
sunshine eyes,
they look through
the black veil: creating
new stars in barren skies
with their cosmic minds.
Joe Amaral, Arroyo Grande
Autumn Evening Alive
The western sky catches fire tonight,
burning flares stretch over blue
worlds of lapping ocean.
Before I can pour a glass of wine,
sparks billow into snapping orange flames,
framing waters stilled steel gray.
Deep hues of red-orange hover
over the horizon, slipping beneath
as jade hilltop trees darken
into black silhouettes poised on edge.
A lone tree hunches forward,
head down, sighing into earth
as night falls.
Bonnie Young, Arroyo Grande
Avalanche
It was a lightslide,
Cracked off from the edge of dawn
and tumbling across the dark earth.
It ran its fingers along the tow-headed hills
and swirled shivering birds up from their high twigs.
It snapped off tree-shade and fence post
flattening them in its path.
Window panes, car bumpers,
old bottles in the grass and tiny bits of quartz
were struck with a clang or a twinkle
and answered back with razor intensity.
Color blinked its eyes and shouted good morning.
Light bounced.
Light inundated.
Light sparkled.
Light overwhelmed.
Light stroked and held up for examination.
It was a maelstrom of seeing.
Such is the nature of light.
To first pin down and delineate our shadow
and then to swallow it.
Kathy Hansen, Santa Margarita
Gail
The jet
went down,
downtown —
taking the beautiful
girl from Spanish
one with it —
coming home
from stewardess
training.
I was leaving
Spanish two —
we studied the verb
“caer” —
to fall —
illustrated by a plane
heading
nose
down.
Black smoke
to the south —
Distant sirens —
walking across campus,
I already knew.
Theo Moreno, Cambria
Grief
Death has slapped me down this year
Once, twice, thrice and four
Chapter finished, pages closed
Reflected memories
In pain and tears
Raw
Judith K. Carlson, Morro Bay
IVF
Natural. Medical. Technical.
Forty-four months. Rising hopes, gushing blood.
Rocket injections. Medical procedures.
Euphemisms for breaking hearts.
Advanced degree in disappointment.
Living “as if” when it isn’t.
Cells in test tubes.
Nature. Medicine. Technology.
Money helps.
Until it doesn’t.
Moving on.
And then …
The joy of sleepless nights.
Helen Mandlin, Cambria
My Mother’s Vulture
She spots you surfing in the sky over our feet, and something —
your unflapping wings? the effortless flight she wants to take?
soaring an air raft straight into heaven? — something strikes,
makes her gasp, Oh Hawk! as if you were Gott, better than bird.
She sees you not as you are but as she dreams you. She is busy
folding history in her head, inventing a New World. Creation
rises fresh in her brain dying, and it is all so miraculous,
she hurls new language to catch it: Nouns spout adverbs,
verbs spring leaks, clauses blast off in the midst of her sentence,
escape from windows thrown upen, stunning her mind.
Oh Hawk! she cries mesmerized by circles you carve in the sky,
by long black wings like arms outstretched, fingers reaching to
grab for Gott. She transforms you with a word. Buzzard not,
you are majestic — not scavenger scrounge of the putrid dead:
You are Heaven’s bronze huntress who harnesses the wind, and
she would ride you, if only you would please snatch her up.
Chris Weygandt Alba, Paso Robles
One Golden Earring
Earrings fill the window
’Neath the sign — “We stand with our American friends”
Telegraphing heartfelt camaraderie
One of many we saw
The day after the world changed
I chose a pair, gold, elegant, timeless
My souvenir of Florence
From the Ponte Vecchio
A single earring, once a pair
Lonely in my jewelry box
Reminds me of the terror and rage
That threatened to overwhelm us all
That gilded morning
The day after the world changed
Linda Reed, San Miguel
Pa Clyde and the New Deal
Two decades after Wall Street’s crash,
my grandparents, still in Depression mode,
eked out an existence
breeding registered hunting dogs.
Pa Clyde was as passionate
about politics as dogs,
rigging his radio with a long extension cord
to listen to right-wing commentators
while he labored outside.
Coming from Terre Haute
to consider a pointer or setter,
his clients joined him in spewing
contempt for the country’s direction:
That cocky New Yorker, FDR,
bankrupted the country with his New Deal.
Social Security is Socialism!
Before he turned 65, Pa Clyde
drove his 1930 Buick to town
to work as a machinist just enough months
to receive his entitlement,
so he could do dogs
with a little more security.
Cal Wilvert, San Luis Obispo
Pending
Deep, dark drapes fend the winter’s cold.
My hands are stiff and won’t perform their tasks.
Web-weavers in shadowy rafters and corners
Drape invisible dust-catchers,
Connect what used to move ’till it seems that it won’t anymore.
Like politics,
They funnel the light and hope,
Are hung with the carcasses of anything that tried to fly.
But something is banging on the windows.
There is a brewing storm outside;
Gusts of birdsong,
Up-thrusting of green energy,
Blossoms bursting in air,
Petal flurries,
Shrieking cyclones of mating hawks.
There is a storm brewing outside.
I have half a mind to pull those dark drapes down
and let it rush in.
Susan Lara, Atascadero
Pharmacopeia
Plants
more than animals
evolved defensive chemicals
botanists say
because they can’t get up
and run away
We search the earth for secrets
as ancients found
in willow and ginger
foxglove and nightshade …
to defend ourselves
against disease
or to ease
the mind … coca
codeine
nicotine or caffeine …
I just know
I’m defensively
deliriously
drugged
by wildflowers
Rosemary Wilvert, San Luis Obispo
Sarah
Here comes Sarah
up the path to her ground-floor flat.
She’s nearly ninety,
walking home, deliberate of step,
in her mink and sandals.
She takes her time with life
as she wishes death might do for her.
Eyes straight ahead
she stares bold-faced into December’s chill,
something like a soldier with her will.
Sarah leans, full-weight, against the entrance door
and disappears into the mud-green walls
and musty scent
of her apartment,
ten years of New York Times
stacked neatly on the shelves.
Her kitchen smells of coffee.
A cigarette hangs from her bottom lip
as she busies herself with life,
determined to survive,
if not in body
then in some poet’s eyes.
Mary Anne Anderson, Cambria
Styx
Have you
crossed
the river?
I did not
place
the coins
upon your eyes.
What did
the boatman
accept
as payment?
Did he even
deign to
grant you
passage?
There is life
left, for me.
How
will my days
spend themselves?
Will I follow?
Kelly Trost, San Luis Obispo
Sunrise Rhapsody
The rhapsody begins in the east, over
Hollister Peak, with a brilliant
swelling of violas, cellos and tympani, a
display of deep reds and fuchsia.
The intensity does not
sustain and soon fades, a
decrescendo into the gray hills.
The interlude shifts to the
north, an andante of loveliness,
violins, flutes, a harp,
all the clouds
above Cerro Cabrillo reflecting a
calm, consistent pink,
lasting only a few brief minutes.
The finale returns to the
east, brassy and golden, a
fortissimo display, trumpets,
trombones, and horns, that
trail off, leaving only the violins, a
coda of amethyst high above.
Juliane McAdam, Los Osos
Tableau Vivant with Smart Phones
We walk into the courtyard outside
a bookstore in San Luis Obispo,
as five young women in black, 3/4 -length leggings
and draped, diaphanous tops, stop
simultaneously.
The girl at the back holds out her Smart Phone,
and the others point to her, stretched across
the arcade in a diagonal flash mob,
like dancers in stopped motion, posed in lines
sketched by Matisse 100 years ago with nasturtiums.
As we draw close, preparing to pass on the right,
the hive turns as one mind
and moves forward, enveloping
us in their midst.
Gail Jensen Sanford, Morro Bay
The Oaks of Paso Robles
Awkward, all elbows and knees,
the oak postures.
How endearing its grace!
The pond was full.
Loud frogs sang, “Scree! Scree! Scree!”
The oak nodded absently.
“Thus it has always been;
thus it will always be,”
Crickets sang to tree.
“Who knows it better?” thought the tree.
“History belongs to me.
Always.”
Now that the drought has broken,
A few dead sticks on top,
the rest washed green,
Old oak can’t deny
It was afraid to die —
it’s covered with acorns.
All roots and branches,
big oak charges downriver,
still power and strength.
Perl Munak, Paso Robles
This is Her Ireland
Last week she turned one hundred years old.
Born in Ireland.
She has lived on the central coast of California
eighty years, married, raised a family in her
small home overlooking Morro Bay.
In the Spring a rainbow of flowers cascades
down the cliffs.
Hills, the color of potatoes she dug as a child,
now the color of shamrocks.
When she was younger she wanted to return
to Ireland,
but now in the Springtime, this land becomes
the home of her childhood.
As she rocks on her porch, she looks out
and sees herself again playing in the clover.
George Asdel, Atascadero
Water Has Memory
You start by breaking your mother’s water
Pushing out into the world
Your time begging to be measured separately
You cling to each moment silent sailing
Gathering your strength harboring your talents
When you are able to speak you begin the slow dance
Your movements carrying you further your language blossoming
Building upon every stubble nothing is left unchallenged
Everything is grist for the mill the heart opens wider
Your embrace is becoming your reach for
Every valley every mountain every roadway
Every creek every river every ocean
Once again you are sailing remembering the stars
You are stardust you are a creature of the Milky Way
You are water remembering the way home
Kevin Patrick Sullivan, San Luis Obispo
Wildness
I always wanted to be close to a wild animal.
The squirrel I coaxed into my grandfather’s
blacksmith shop wandered in but stayed only a day.
The wild cat near the old water well and the tar pit
came close (as I sat still, barely breathing), hoping
the wildness would leave, but the wildness didn’t leave.
The wildness didn’t leave and the cat and the
squirrel both left as they had come.
Now you have gone, too, though I lay still, barely breathing,
near the well, hoping you could be tamed,
near the well, hoping your wildness would leave.
Eve Cone, Atascadero
Winter’s Day
Rain upon the roof
El Niño pays a visit.
Turkey soup smells good.
Stacey A. Stack, Arroyo Grande
This story was originally published April 4, 2016 at 7:09 AM with the headline "Poems from SLO County residents celebrate National Poetry Month | Week 1."