Place Issue

place /plās/ noun

1. a particular position or point in space.
2. a portion of space available or designated for or being used by someone.
3. a position in a sequence or series, typically one ordered on the basis of merit.

Be here now.

The power of place is considered elemental to storytelling. Place is the context in which things happen. But when we articulate “place,” it is one of those English language words that can have so many allusions: a particular point in physical space; a location in memory, time, or imagination; a position of rank or status or merit.

The reason physical locale is important is because it doesn’t only relate to a particular point in space, but rather the cultural and evolutionary attributes associated with that place.

“Often the places we grow up in have outsized influence on us. They influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us — they are our source of subjectivity as well as a commonality by which we can relate to and identify with others. Maybe it’s because of the vividness of their sensory impressions, their genius for establishing deep relationships to their early environments, that children have a strong capacity for the human emotion called topophilia.

[…]

Across cultures, navigation is influenced by particular environmental conditions — snow, sand, water, wind — and topographies — mountain, valley, river, ocean, and desert. But in all of them, it is also a means by which individuals develop a sense of attachment and feeling for places. Navigating becomes a way of knowing, familiarity, and fondness. It is how you can fall in love with a mountain or a forest. Wayfinding is how we accumulate treasure maps of exquisite memories.” M.R. O’Connor.

In media for the Secret of Our Success, evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich states, “As both Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek argued long before Erik and me, it’s our automatic norm following—not our self-interest or our cool rational calculation of future consequences—that often makes us do the ‘right thing’ and allows our societies to work. This means that how well a society functions depends on its package of social norms.

“Thus, the world that cultural evolution often creates is one in which different groups possess different social norms and where norm boundaries are often marked by language, dialect, dress, or other markers….

“Recognizing that we are a cultural species means that, even in the short run (when genes don’t have enough time to change), institutions, technologies, and languages are coevolving with psychological biases, cognitive abilities, emotional responses, and preferences. In the longer run, genes are evolving to adapt to these culturally constructed worlds, and this has been, and is now, the primary driver of human genetic evolution.”

Thus, our location in the world is a driver of our unique story through our cultural references; our understanding of history, time and memory; and how we see ourselves in the greater society.

Psychological attachment to place can be so strong, in fact, that it can even limit creativity. In Triggering Town, Richard Hugo says unfamiliarity with a location breeds effectiveness in clarity of emotion in storytelling. Predetermined emotional attachment to familiar locations can muddy the narrative because, “[y]our hometown often provides so many knowns that the imagination cannot free itself to seek the unknowns.”

For this issue, we were looking for writing that explores how the concept of how place influences your culture, language, and evolution.  We embraced unfamiliar concepts (Solastalgia is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium and the Greek root -algia, that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. Philosopher Michel Foucault uses the term heterotopia (French: hétérotopie) to describe spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye). Place became character for some authors, narrative for others, the relevance of place to culture and personality. Place isn’t just a physical location: it is tenors, norms, seasons, flora and fauna. In this issue, the authors move the conversation with the readers across landscapes physical and virtual.

We have added a new feature for the new year: several of our poets have submitted audio and you can hear their poems in their own voices.  Thanks, as always, to our readers for continuing the conversations.

Managing Editor Charles Entrekin has an article at his website Rhymes and Ruminations “A Poetry of Mood, Place, & Time” voiced by Eugene Berson. As his vision has deteriorated over the years, he is so grateful for the advance of new technologies. 

I.

Before Pennsylvania, the world was flat, the distance between two horizons a straight view. In those other states, I walked a state-of-mind, linear but un-liveable. Map coordinates located something less than inhale/exhale. Now place has something to do with oxygen horded in the limbs of hemlock and elm, with the way these mountains bulge with breath. Air blooms among such un-bashful blues and greens, darts with the dragonfly, drinks with the white-tailed deer. Always, it winds with the creeks, then glides over Allegheny curves to rise up with the hawks. When the firefly blinks, it is not an S.O.S but a refrain from a mountain song so old you can hear the hills humming.

II.

The only light in the shotgun house is the steady blink of the TV. I’ve swept her job at the mill beneath the corners of a forty-year-old carpet, crammed his factory work in the closet they no longer open. But for years, I couldn’t ignore the hum of what they didn’t have, the absence they gave my husband in abundance. I can almost touch each wall with its peeling paper of orange watering cans as I hike between sheet-covered furniture lined up for the one clear view of a sit-com. Though I try to get comfortable, I can’t. Even the air bunches up against itself between straight planes of plaster.

Outside the narrow windows, bricks block the coal-tinged breeze. Rusting lawn chairs clutter the neighbors’ crumbling porches, from which out-of-work, middle-aged men stare at each other, and do nothing. Teens compete at squealing their make-shift hot rods down the thin strip of asphalt leftover between tightly parked pick-ups and hand-me-down four-doors. From the cracked sidewalk, barefoot girls in midriffs pause their hopscotch and wave.

I head instead to their backyard, where blooms border a six-by-four yard and spill over as geraniums and pansies, roses and Lazy Susans, tulips and marigolds. Hummingbirds nip nectar. Tomatoes bob from stalks tied-up with old panty hose. Lettuce proclaims victory over rabbits, and strawberries congratulate themselves for against-the-odds growth. My brown thumb, envious to the end, fingers joy.                            

III.

The doe and its fawn enter our backyard on the slant, kitty-corner themselves from rhododendron bush to magnolia. Theirs is a quiet joy, stepping just so from their hills into suburbia, the distance six hops of a skipped stone. They’ve forgotten to worry and remember this grass and the long limbs of our maple. They step easily between swing set and tool shed, detour around a half-finished game of croquet. Nurtured on grace, they politely turn their sleek necks to avoid our gaze. From behind glass, my children stare.  They compare the soft sheen of the deers’ fur to sketched likenesses in store-bought books. My husband warns them not to open the door, not to let the conditioned air out.

IV.

Beneath the tent flaps, my children and I breathe in the wild Pennsylvania air. The mountains, we say, are hugging the wind, the laurel so thick we could pick a thousand blooms. All evening we count the blinks of fireflies. We sense hawks circling the night clouds above our camp and bears obediently pausing between the zigzags of evergreens. We listen long into the dark until the drone of crickets leads us into dreams full of deer and ruffed grouse. Then we doze without worry, the curve of the world huddled about us as we breathe its crispness in.

In the chilled morning air, when we emerge from sleep and the tent door, it is—almost-surprisingly—just our backyard on the outside, our hammock waiting in the half-light of dawn. We think we hear the doe and her fawn, but it is my husband up on the patio, already flipping blueberry pancakes on the griddle. The country-style bacon sizzles with joy when we join him, humming our campfire rounds

A massive clap of thunder shook the house, woke us all up at around 3am, loud enough I got out of bed to see if lightning had hit a nearby tree. Two hours later, for the first time, I heard the Hi-Lo siren, a slowed down version of the traditional European siren: high pitch, low pitch, on and on. A sheriff’s car was slowly making it’s way down our country road.

Phone calls. Texts. IMMEDIATE EVACUATION ORDER. “It’s at Jones Bar.” “It’s down by the river.” “It’s on Owl Creek Road.” “Just go!”

We weren’t properly prepared. I suppose almost no one is. Dazed by the siren in the still-dark morning, my wife headed straight for the door, no purse or phone or change of clothing. One son packed only his basketball shoes, another grabbed his sketchbooks. My mother pulled down one small bag after another, filled them with what I can only assume was 75% of her closet and dresser, then lined them up to be loaded into the car.

They left. I stayed behind, finding a crate for the cat, packing pet bowls, food, and medicine, grabbing a photo album. I took pictures of every room, pulled down one small painting, looked for birth certificates. I was unwilling to leave. I couldn’t see flames, wasn’t even clear where the fire was. What’s the hurry, I thought. I have plenty of time.

Suddenly remembering I hadn’t dealt with insurance for my brand new tractor, I called the agency up, casually laughing and mentioning that I needed to get that policy going soon. Like, today? I went outside to do something about it, my precious tractor, the tractor I’d wanted since I was 6 years old, delivered just a week ago, on which I’d not yet even made a payment.

While the planes and helicopters fought the fire down the canyon, I tried to water the soil around it. It was late summer, so the well ran dry, needed resetting, ran dry again. The tractor sat less than forty yards from our front door, beautiful orange like the smoke-shrouded sun above, forlorn in an empty field.

The planes came closer, then circled directly above me, skimmed the tops of trees, engines roaring so loud I could hear it in my chest. Surging with adrenaline, I drove the truck, fully packed, up the road to get a better view. I even tried to capture a video of the exact moment a bomber dropped a cloud of pink fire retardant on a neighbor’s house. Or course this wasn’t a movie, wasn’t filtered, edited, wrapped in a neat package. I could see the flames on the other side of the road. Thick smoke billowed and swirled from the tops of burning trees.

My heart raced. Captivated by the drama and danger, by the planes racing against time and destruction, I moved the truck to the northwest corner of my land, even closer to the fire, and sat watching flames grind through the trees and brush toward me. Stripped of it’s tasks and considerations, here before me was real life, raw, bright, strange, new.

Almost accidentally, out of the corner of my eye, I saw flames now burning in the dry grass on the other side of the truck. Winds pushed embers through the sky. Orange fingers of flame reached forward in all directions. And yet, and yet, and yet—I could not leave. I moved again to the driveway, truck loaded, engine running. I watched the flames cross onto my land, all along the fence line to the west, watched them leap from oak to oak, consume an entire pine tree in seconds, like a bomb.

With a sudden ache of grief and shock, I realized that I was going to lose the house, and everything in it. A huge wave of loss crashed into my body. This is actually it, I thought, nauseated. My luck’s run out. I’ll be the guy pulling melted spoons from charred wreckage, or standing in the blackened center of nothing left.

Flame slid across the low grasses, inexorable. I imagined some scenario in which I leap-frogged both truck and tractor, moving one forward, then running back to the next, little chunks of ground gained each time, down the road to safety. I left the truck running and ran toward the flames. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking.

The fire was just five feet from the tractor when I got there. In that instant, I forgot my plan to leave. Instead, motivated entirely by immediate need, I dropped the scraper box and began dragging forward to create a line of bare dirt, to somehow slow the flames. I stopped, looked up for a moment.

That’s when I first saw it. The entire southern boundary of the land was on fire. Embers had flown 200 yards through the air. Flames licked tree trunks, took down native shrubs in flaring, explosive instants. All the time I’d sat in the driveway on the north side of the house, anxiously studying the flames grinding through the landscape to the west of me, I hadn’t once considered fire from any other direction. While I’d processed the inevitable loss of every single thing I owned, silent flames crawled up behind me. Across the meadow, just 20 feet from the wooden stairs, from my son’s bedroom, a lilac bush went up in flames.

In an instant, I turned the tractor around. I was frantic. To get to the fire, I had to drive all the way around the house. Just as I arrived, the flames caught a patch of tall dry grasses, on a slope too steep to mow. I had no idea what to do next, so I started digging at the flames, tamping them down with the bucket, pushing soil forward.

All time stilled to that moment.

A minute later, a single firefighter arrived with a handheld tank and started spraying the forward flanks of flame. Shortly after, a couple of wildland crews pulled up. Short tough trucks, three people in each, carrying just 500 gallons of water. The crews started dragging hoses and scraping the ground around the house with fire rakes. One crew worked to save the barn, unsuccessfully, while the other began spraying the bases of trees, where the flames seemed to cluster, to gather resources.

Then there was fire everywhere, finding every opportunity to move. Winds came up and pushed fast flames through the north side, then the west. The southern meadow sparked again. At times the air itself seemed to burn. Crisscrossing the land, I dragged the scraper, dug soil, pushed charred brush and logs away from structures. The well head burned, the land line melted. Cell service was nonexistent. An hour in, I stopped to refuel the tractor, and realized the truck was still running, the animals still waiting, scared, desperately thirsty.

The fire crews came and went, simultaneously battling fires at 15 other houses, along the freeway, making a stand at a road 2 miles away, beyond which lay a housing development. They would suddenly, almost magically appear just when a massive tree was igniting, or, at 5am, when the flames crept toward my propane tank, battling them into semi-submission before moving on again.

Night fell. The flames got lower and slower, less intense. Fire fighters call this ‘laying down.’ It crawled through the creek gully, leaving smoking black land and isolated flames from burning tree roots buried in soil, like campfires on a Civil War battlefield. The fuel around my house was all burned out, so I went to a neighbor’s and drove in circles through the darkness, trying to cut some sort of fire line around his cabin, to stop the flames from marching west toward other houses.

When I returned, woozy, dehydrated, lungs filled with smoke, two massive bulldozers crawled across the land, otherworldly, unstoppable, big as dinosaurs, bright spotlights cutting through thick smoke. They were following the black, cutting along the edge of the fire so as to create a line between the still glowing hot spots and the unburned land. I went inside, drank three warm beers, lay on the carpet where the air was least smoky. I catnapped, rose and worked, catnapped some more.

In the end, I lost the barn, a couple of sheds, the well head, all of the fruit trees, the hedgerow, 2000 feet of irrigation lines, and much of the beautiful forest surrounding our house. Five neighbors lost their homes, four others suffered damage. We were lucky – we still have a house. We still have photo albums and refrigerator magnets, hand-written journals and couch cushions, one hundred-year-old chess pieces and a new TV. We still have the consequential and the banal, the precious and the forgotten.

And I still have the tractor, a little blistered, no longer so shiny. Like a fool, I had run out to save it. With that curious luck sometimes gifted to fools, I’d saved the house, too. I blame the tractor. I praise the tractor.

©Scott V. Young

You might think someone left the recliner inside
the room for a purpose, springs shot, foot-rest level 

with head, the chair turned, so from the window 
what you see is less what it was and more the plump

letter V in abandoned profile.  A ruined thing
in a derelict place, the window has reformed

the worn-out stuffing, flexed the frame to favor
the hard starting letter in a word like vanity

or valor, a wall spray-painted in a grin.  If only
I might dream my failures away, trashing them

within moments where I left pain reclining
among its decay, so indentations resettle

like time between promising positions that
invariably give when you must leave your broken

parts to get better.  Behind the shattered window,
the trashed recliner is an irreparable V—one letter

leftover from the long decomposition of a word
like lover, the chair back plush in buttoned down.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” my grandfather’s neighbor asked me. As I looked up at him, it was hard to make him out.  Shadows from the sycamore trees jostled his face so it kept pulling apart and coming together again like a reflection in water. This apparitional aspect disembodied his voice, as if the question were coming not from him but from the shifting leaves. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I took it as another test. My answer would depend on whether or not I could discern who or what was asking. I knew, as a kid, I was always mildly under suspicion. If it were truly the neighbor asking his question would either be motivated by enviously wondering would I answer as he might, were he to be young again; or it would be the voice of impersonal authority testing my conformity. In either case my answer would be a condoned lie irrelevant to whatever I might imagine for my future. But if it was the voice of the leaves my answer would require a more subtle form of deception: it would have to be true but coded, like Jesus always coded his answers in parables. In addition to the undercurrent of suspicion adults maintained toward children, I also had the vague but mounting sense, as I grew older, that something was coming behind me with a not altogether benign intent,  like a gothic street sweeper, and not just toward me, but all kids. Where did this feeling come from?

Every place we loved was disappearing. Vacant lots we had dug forts in, our instinctive refuges into the mysterious underground, were  rapidly disappearing under subdivisions, and magnificent oak trees few dared climb were being quickly collared by parking lots. The cow field, a kind of eternal horizon, turned into Ampex Corporation, and the marsh, its egrets and ducks wisely out of range, leveed and drained to create acres of barren, pink salt beds for Leslie Salt Company. I could see an eerie Mount Fuji, a mountain of salt several stories high, glittering at the edge of a bay retreating farther and farther away. Wrecking yards and trailer parks had taken over its filtering wetlands, a stopover for migrating birds that no longer showed up. Grownups were occupying the wild places, those refuges where our imaginations ranged and strengthened. How can you know what you want to be if your imagination is losing the habitat it flourishes in?

Years later, I was stopped at the light at Shattuck and University on a Sunday morning, the streets deserted. A man was doggedly trying to push ten inter-connected shopping carts diagonally across the intersection. The pavement swelled in the center into a slight rise, forcing him to push with all his strength. His  stained coat briefly shorted out in a blinding, soft explosion of sun as it rose over the East Bay hills. When the man reappeared, one wheel of the front cart had caught in a manhole cover and the cart began to teeter, tilting the one behind it, lifting its wheel, and threatened to spiral down the chain. He struggled to hold the line upright as it twisted, like a pilot trying to keep a plane that has lost an engine from going down, but it was too much for him. Each cart was stuffed full, the incline unbalancing them. The long train of carts, interlocked, began to spill over until it collapsed in a clattering wave like a basket of silverware, jarring the quiet street. 

As I watched this catastrophe, a former cabinet member of Clinton’s administration was being interviewed on my car radio. He was talking about the role he played to create welfare reform, which resulted in Clinton signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996. “We wanted people to work,” he said, “to re-instill in them the ethic of hard work that America was founded on.” Within twenty years general consensus acknowledged that the welfare act added up to a messy compromise. Clinton himself described it as “Welfare reform in a bag of shit.” And as for work ethic, please don’t tell me pushing ten shopping carts through city streets isn’t hard work. 

As the politician spoke I watched the presumably homeless man unhook his carts so that he could get them back up on their wheels and re-connect them. A few other cars had showed up in the meantime, as if drawn to the scene like seagulls to a picnic, imposing a polite pressure on the man. His manner had an ironic charm, given that the whole thing was playing out in the middle of the street. It was admirable how unhurried he was, how he worked with ritualistic patience. The empty streets that Sunday morning allowed the intersection to emerge as a stage, an altar even, transforming the homeless man into a shaggy shaman tending a sacrifice.

But what was being sacrificed? The notion of getting anywhere. His train’s destination was put on hold by its accidental collapse. The incident gave this otherwise socially useless man a chance to exhibit his transformative powers by creating a play. He needed to be useless to become useful in this way. Traffic waited. The active world paused. When the caravan fell it tore open the fabric of time, bringing us together, dispelling the illusion of our individual isolation. Isn’t this just the break we need? Isn’t this why John and Yoko took to their bed in a world torn by war? Einstein leaped out of his grave to flicker over the shopping carts as a blessing. 

Just then a plastic bag scooted over the street, swelled, lifted and escaped gravity so effortlessly the man stood there, and I, in my car, watching it flit up the side of a building, as if tapping it for weak spots, until it sailed above the rooftop and was swept out of sight. Indeed, what was the purpose of the sacrifice? And who could have predicted an angel would appear as a plastic bag, showing that you could fly free of everything you’ve collected and live more simply.

In another era, the shopping cart shaman might have been a herder moving his goats to another pasture, part of the essential work life takes. So much of the future depends on how we see things. This incident refocused the question about what work is: what motivated that man’s work, incidentally picking up what’s been thrown out by a culture working compulsively to produce even more of it—on the Sabbath? From what source did he receive his mission, what inspired his patience and authority, what fulfilling social function drove him and, with what caring, did he he lift his fallen beast back up? What, in fact, is true work?

Thinking back on this incident I invoke the angel of the plastic bag. She showed us we can fly free—of our things, of our stories, of what we’ve done and not done. I remember the leaves whispering through my grandfather’s neighbor’s question, “what are you going to be when you grow up?” I felt my grandfather, in his suit and vest, made of wool woven so meticulously it had the texture of fine brown sand, intricate and jewel-like, each stitch a pearl, anticipating my answer. I focused on his suit like one road I might take. I admired it but it looked too constraining. It didn’t look comfortable. I wore Levi’s, tennis shoes, a T-shirt. I ran through the marsh like Huck Finn, floated on make-shift rafts in the sloughs. But I was a badge of upbringing for him. I knew there were columns in the want ads for engineers. This was the fifties—decade of The Bomb. Math and Science were the power and way. “An engineer,” I answered. I heard my voice thin. I was lying. And the two men were complicit. I liked to go barefoot, and was beginning to resent the regimentation of school. Huck Finn had caught my imagination on fire and I had my own way to go. I had to master the art of disguise, and for that, I knew I would have to understand the language of leaves.

It’s vital that we struggle to do what we want to do. Our dreams are often casualties of growing up. What happens to them? The answer is in the streets. Homeless people are pushing shopping carts through our cities’ back alleys looking for the dreams we threw away when we grew up and took jobs we hated. As a culture we are living an unimagined life. We are destroying the habitat of our imagination. 

For nine years I swam in this bay,
nearly every day, all hours, all weather,
from Alcatraz, across the Golden Gate
diving off Fort Mason—always
I came out changed, sat in Ghirardelli’s
overlooking where I swam
drinking a cappuccino on the outside deck,
blissful, but sobered by sorrowful calm.
 
I consult, almost scry, this surface—
facets reflecting overcast sky—
I know it so well
how cold it is, how it tastes
less salty after spring rains
how it carried me on swims, lifted me,
forced me to fight current
nudged me with the edge of its tide.
 
And all the while my swimming was really
an imagined conversation with my father,
who swam in this ocean as a young man,
and with whom I rarely talked
during that period, without arguing.
What makes me pause now, being
so much alike, is that things we couldn’t say
to each other were heard by the sea.

I’m at the helm on my back porch
totally in charge of nothing
but my coffee this Easter morning
and the birdseed I’ve scattered for sparrows
across the carport roof  
overlooking the parking lot
of the Vietnamese laundromat.

There’s a great clamor and excitement
a festival feeling in the cool morning air
in front of the warehouse on the corner
as Mexicans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans
break out pink and white ice cream carts
to pedal through the neighborhood ringing bells
awakening flocks of shrieking children.

The sides of the El Tio Juan taco truck pulse
oompahs from tubas now at home in Mariachi
to declare music’s democratic heart in Oakland’s mix.

In the thirties El Tio Juan’s taco truck
was Casper’s hot dog cart, arrived like a covered wagon
from the Dust Bowl. Salsa has replaced Ketchup
as America’s favorite condiment, recipes and instruments,
are among what people carry dearly
fleeing war, following dreams.

Wary sparrows
eyes out for the cat lounging in spring ivy
climbing onto the roof, hang back
on stringy limbs of the birch tree 
in a hierarchy known only to them
then chance it, splash down
their sporadic pecking
pattering like beginning rain.

Corn kernels in the birdseed sparkle
the sun softly rising
people gathering below
lining up at the truck for coffee
to take refuge in what’s at hand—
the smell of sizzling chorizo
to watch soccer on TV in the shade
under the awning as laundry spins.

A passing blue Mustang rapping rhyme
snaps along synapses dormant for years
setting off new neurons like a string of firecrackers
a bass line breaking in thunderous waves
so explosive the air shudders and Gospel soars
on the torn wings of an organ pumping out praise

the storefront church across Foothill is open
receiving people dressed up for Easter—
dudes in sharp cream-colored suits
women’s hats flouncing like fuchsias
patent leather shoes buffing concrete steps 
as if shushing the celebrants
into the House of the Lord.

The couple in the parking lot
living out of their car
hood up, trunk open
four or five days now
having awakened slowly
attend their toiletries. After he shaves
in the sideview mirror she seats herself
on a stool from somewhere
and allows him to comb her hair in the sun.

Dipping his comb into a bucket of water
he snaps off a whip of drops, lifts it aloft,
a baton between forefinger and thumb
conducting the entire spectacle
before drawing filaments of light
through the grain of her hair
—his movements sacramental
her chaste, expectant stillness
sustains a grace so silent
you can hear the ’hood sing.

September, 2021

What does poetry have to do with politics? For many people, nothing at all. But in my own career as a poet and critic, poetry and politics have repeatedly converged.

When I had the honor of being named New York State Poet in 2018, I thought immediately of a deeply political poem that actually shaped history, and that happens to be the perfect refutation of W.H.Auden’s notorious claim that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The words of Emma Lazarus, engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, are so familiar that many people suppose they have always exemplified the American dream. The actual story is more interesting.

The statue was a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States entitled “Liberty Enlightening the World,” and was intended to celebrate the friendship between France and the USA, two nations that had overthrown monarchies and established republics. Dedicated in 1886, the tablet held by the statue is inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI, the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence; the broken shackle and chain at the statue’s foot was to commemorate the end of slavery.1 It had nothing to do with immigration.

Lazarus, a successful American Jewish author, was invited to submit a poem to be used to raise funds for the pedestal. At first she demurred. But a friend suggested that such a poem could offer hope to the flood of despised immigrants arriving on our shores, many of them Jews fleeing the pogroms of Russia and eastern Europe. We need to remember that nobody wanted these people—they were peasants, dirty and probably diseased, probably criminals, they smelled bad, they didn’t speak English. Does this sound familiar? These are standard accusations made by parties who reject immigration, in all times and places. But Lazarus was already involved in visiting Ward’s Island, advocating for housing, health and employment for destitute refugees kept there in miserable conditions. “Until we are all free, we are none of us free,” she wrote. She had been politicized by events. Now she wrote the poem we all know, a Petrarchan sonnet entitled “The New Colossus:”

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Redefining America’s greatness not as military might but as world-wide welcome and freedom, Lazarus’ poem succeeded, surely beyond the poet’s wildest dreams, in changing the meaning of the statue, the meaning of the port of New York City, and the meaning of the United States of America. It defined us as a nation of immigrants, whose core value was that its people could “breathe free.”

My grandparents came to this country at the turn of the twentieth century, just after the moment that inspired the poem. They were escaping poverty and violence. None of them ever became rich, but they survived. For them, the escape from an old world of monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, and the dream of a new world of freedom and safety, came true. My parents in turn taught me that I should be proud of being American, not because we were “the greatest,” whatever that means, but because we were the melting pot. We were a democracy that gave hope to the hopeless. We were the land where prejudice and hatred might one day be eliminated.

That day has not yet come. Many Americans whose own ancestors were immigrants prefer a wall to a door. Americans whose ancestors were kidnapped and brought here by force, as slaves, do not experience “world-wide welcome” here. Nor do Americans whose ancestors lived here before Europeans arrived and began stealing their land. Yet the promise of inclusion remains an ongoing key to our history, which is why the USA continues to attract immigrants.

It is also why American poetry increasingly through the twentieth and on into the twenty-first century has become a place for the voiceless to find a voice. Whitman heard “varied carols.” Langston Hughes wrote “I too sing America.” Today, American poetry is a thoroughly hybrid phenomenon. The margins have moved to the center. Women poets took the stage in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. The Nuyorican Café in New York City since 1979, the Cave Canem community of Black poets since 1996, and other organizations supporting “outsider” poets, have changed the course of the river. A suite of New York City poems in my recent book Waiting for the Light highlights the Spanish spoken in my upper west side neighborhood. Afro-American, Native American, Asian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Latinx, gay and trans men and women are all part of the collective song we offer to the world.

As New York State Poet, I wanted to support the idea of welcome represented by Lazarus’ poem. I liked giving talks about it and what it represented. Then In 2019 I and my colleague Mihaela Moscaliuc, who came here from Romania, began collecting translations of “The New Colossus” by American poets of widely varied ancestries and mother tongues. At the present time, we have gathered over forty translations, in languages ranging from Arabic and Bengali to Uzbek and Yiddish. These translations are all available online, along with statements by each poet saying something about the immigration experience and in a few cases including a recording of the poet’s voice. Our host is, appropriately, the American Jewish Historical Society, which has its own Emma Lazarus exhibit.

We hope these translations will find a wide readership, be adopted by other organizations such as the new Statue of Liberty Museum, and be used by educators. Globally, we hope that people everywhere in the world will have access to the poem in their own languages, and understand that the American dream of worldwide welcome is still alive.

As I am about to rotate off the position of New York State Poet, let me conclude with a poem of our own time that connects directly with the ideal expressed by Lazarus. After the disaster of 9/11, there was an explosion of poetry throughout this country. Thousands of poems old and new were written, posted, shared; ideas of poetry as testament, grieving and healing were everywhere.

Of those thousands, an extraordinary example is Martín Espada’s “Alabanza.” Espada is a Puerto Rican- American poet known for his engagement with issues of social justice. But he is both political and lyrical, and at times, as the poem “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100” shows, mystical. “Alabanza”—a word meaning praise—is dedicated “for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. Here is the opening:

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,

a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago.

Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle

glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap

worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane

that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked

even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Espada introduces us to a busboy, a dishwasher who worked that morning because he needed the overtime, a waitress singing along with the radio: New Yorkers at work beneath the media’s radar. The poem’s climax and ending arrive “After the thunder wilder than thunder, / after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows:

for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo, like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us

about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face, soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations across the night sky of this city and cities to come. Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue: Teach me to dance. We have no music here.

And the other said with a Spanish tongue: I will teach you. Music is all we have.

In his celebration of immigrant experience Espada manages to fuse realistic contemporary detail with fantasy, deep time, and the offerings of the spirit, which are multiple and global. The cook’s tattoo means “listen” in several cultures. Baseball enters the poem with the Puerto Rican right fielder Roberto Clemente. Myth enters with a vision of Manhattan “from a hundred and seven flights up” as Atlantis. Spirituality enters with an imaginary “chant of nations” and the cook’s soul. At the core of the poem is the poet’s dream of inclusion. In our current divided days, may our poetry continue to sustain that dream.

Alicia Ostriker
Chancellor, Academy of American Poets 2015-2020 New York State Poet 2018-2021

A good Wikipedia article describes the poem’s origins and symbolism.

The rain’s been falling for weeks, Bodega Head ethereal in mist,
the fishing boats almost mirages, odd arrangements of sticks
like tiny black letters in the grey and yellow light,
but we’ve come out, my dog and I, to walk the gravel road
to the beach between the rusty marshes, green and red with ice plant
in full regalia for spring, the signal most years for the rains to cease,
the long dry months to begin here along the North Coast
where the land meets up with the sea in a friendlier way
than the bluffs of its neighbor, Bodega Head, its precipitous trails
and brightly clad whale watchers with their weekend binoculars and hats. 
Here sandy loam wetlands ease the land’s way out to the crashing Pacific,
still aloft in its winter waves.
 
No one else out in this weather, and this is our last day here,
the dog and I. Time to close up the cabin and return to the city,
to the man who sits rooted at the window, half ghost, listening
to the invisible birds at the feeder, freely coming and going.
But here the dog has found a mole hole to pounce on
and now she’s gamboling off to see what’s up ahead. 
 
And now I can see the whole wetland before me
and there’s a small packet of brown ducks
in the upper corner of the canvas, and closer in,
along the trail, a snowy egret stands fishing for her supper,
immobile as if she were made of stone. 
 
I leash the dog and sit here on this wooden bench
dedicated by some bereaved soul to a loved one who has passed,
the metal plaque rusted away in the salty air.  Still
the missing person, who no doubt walked here daily
among the tall grasses between ponds
sits invisibly dreaming on the bench beside us. 
 
Two Canada geese flap in honking, skid side-by-side
across the water between the reeds and come to rest,
well-deserved – it’s spring migration time and they
may have come all the way from Mexico. 
 
And now the egret is giving it up. 
She raises her wings tentatively
and then with a strong surge they flap and she is up
her long golden legs trailing behind her white feathers
as she lifts above us and soars away
out over the emerald hills.          
 
 

Location, location, they say. It used to be that a place was just where you were. But anthropologists and environmental educators have elevated the importance of place, letting us know that a person’s home place affects their development and culture. We realize that children especially latch onto the place where they grow up and it affects everything from personality to values and health. That is why we can feel nostalgic for the place of our upbringing, or even solastalgic, which goes beyond homesickness and involves grief for a natural environment that has changed over time. This is what I have. I am and always have been a nature advocate, profoundly influenced by the place where I grew up. For members of the baby boomer generation like myself, as kids we played in nearby fields and forests all day. There was no ecophobia or worry about stranger danger back then. It was how a youngster learned about the world.

The place was Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the early sixties. It was the time before urbanization took over and there were still farms about the countryside, even close to the city. We were more connected to the land back then. We lived in one of the town’s first suburbs, before anyone knew what suburbia was. The subdivision we lived in consisted of parceled-out sections of the old Zinke farm in Wisconsin. The farmhouse still stood at the top of the hill and Grandpa and Grandma Zinke kept a huge colorful garden there.

At the end of the street was an old patch of woods, untouched by any development. This was our secret place to hide out. The naturally growing trees were easy to climb, with limbs all over the place. In the winter, tiny ponds in the woods became skating rinks. In my time amongst the trees, I became an explorer, scientist, and storyteller. It was the beginning of my naturalist career.

An expansive grassy field beckoned directly behind the neighborhood houses. The field was our play area. We ran through acres of grassy meadow and hid from each other below the high grass stems. My older brothers caught overly abundant grasshoppers and brought them back to play with. Meanwhile I would catch all the butterflies I could – monarchs, swallowtails, mourning cloaks and sulphurs. The creatures would be studied, then left to wing away to their homes.

For a journey into nature that had a little help from man’s hand, it was a short bike ride to the nearest county park. Every autumn, flocks of geese and ducks stopped over for supplies on their way south. I’ll never forget the chatter and honks of hundreds of birds which took over the golf course. A number of ponds joined together to make a roundabout ice-skating rink. At the ponds’ edge, we could tiptoe a few feet into the naked woods. In the summer, we fished the ponds with homemade poles. I was always running off to play in wild areas, even small patches of it. Diving into the ditch that separated the neighborhood’s back road in two, I entered a secret world. Tiny snapdragons told me stories of nature, flapping their little mouths as I pinched the back of them.

If the family was driving out of town and heading north in the spring, we would sometimes find wild asparagus growing along the country roadsides. If we could get enough, it was a real treat served with dinner. Wisconsin was big corn-growing country, and the tall crops were everywhere outside the city. No one could resist the temptation to help themselves to a few ears on a late summer’s Sunday drive. Corn on the cob – fresh taste of the farm. On a nice autumn day, it was common for townies to take a drive to gawk at the brilliant fall colors. The southern half of the state boasted maples, ash, oak, and so much more. Leaves were always collected in an assortment of colors and shapes.

There were more trips with the family that took us a little farther afield. In Wisconsin, ‘up north’ means anyplace north of the center of the state. But what it really refers to is a state of mind – out of the city and into the wilderness. ‘Up north’ was a common vacation area and we went there almost every summer. I remember water skiing, horseback riding, fishing, and boat rides.

Other places that I visited in childhood also made an impression on me. I remember both sets of grandparents having wonderful gardens – enchanting places I wanted to recreate in my adult life. There were two public botanical gardens in Milwaukee and we visited them often. Boerner Botanical Garden contained many differently themed landscapes. Here we explored formal gardens and wild, and an entire garden just of roses. Mitchell Park Conservatory, on the other hand, had three different ecological gardens each contained under a temperature-controlled dome.

In elementary school, they took us on field trips to farms just outside of town. Sometimes the farms came to us at the green market. It was outdoors and in the open air, a cornucopia for the senses. Piles and crates-full of produce in all the colors – green, gold, red, orange – seemed to blend together into an unending bounty. My feeling was one of total awe, and always will be. When I got older, I would explore farmer’s markets along the roadsides. When I saw one, it was an obligatory stop to touch base with the folksy, rural element of life. Touching the fresh produce was like touching life. It seemed to revitalize the spirit. Though I never knew anyone who actually grew the vegetables, I became fascinated with the practice and the lifestyle.

Determined to learn how to grow things for myself and maybe even develop a crop that would feed the world, as an altruistic 18-year-old I entered an agricultural college and studied agronomy, or crop science. Strangely enough, I would get a job in the beer industry of all things, searching for a barley strain that would make the best tasting brew. Somewhat disillusioned with the lack of satisfaction that this line of work brought, I briefly took a break. What I really loved was not only the growing of things, but growing things, as in nature. And veering off the agricultural path just a little bit, I returned to college to off a degree in forestry. This, too, left me disillusioned as the industry promoted harvest above care, so on I went to find ways to use both my degrees to better the world. My varied career path took me around the country and with jobs that ranged from produce inspector and park ranger to snake handler and cactus cop.

All throughout my working life, I had hobbies that were connected to my fields of expertise. The most prominent one has been gardening. I’ve been trying to garden for 30 years, and it’s been one long expensive experiment. With two degrees in the plant sciences, I also played with everything that involved plants: growing, collecting seed, creating bouquets, pressing flowers, making garden decorations. And, I wrote – for work and as a freelancer, writing about everything nature-related. For my spouse and I, nature and wildlife watching is our biggest shared hobby, done right in our own yard, which has been certified wildlife approved. Whether it’s a woodpecker, a brilliant sunset, or the aroma of freshly planted herbs, the sensory experiences are a great joy and stress-reliever. Now retired, I am an indentured servant to my garden, still expressing my thoughts through writing. Hopefully I can reach one or two who understand that viridity, the life force, is what we are here to benefit from and complement.

I returned to my Wisconsin home ground a few times over the last several decades and was struck by the changes that have occurred. Urbanization has eliminated the “rural edge” effect and hard-core citification terminates abruptly. All vestiges of farm lots bought up and gone, the homespun culture has gradually transformed into more ephemeral settlings, with tenants tech-savvy but disconnected. My wistful remembering turned to solastalgia, as that place of old had an influence on my career choices, my environmental values, and what I found to be important and what made me happy throughout my life. The feeling extends to my current place of residence as I see it succumb to greed and overpopulation.

for Jerzy Nasierowski

The synagogue always smelled of old books and musky carpet, an olfactory relic of a dying world. The perfume would greet us as we entered the great wooden doors at the top of the entrance steps. Every Friday Shabbat service where children ran races in the sanctuary aisles. Every other Saturday morning when at least ten men would trudge across the county to make a minion for pre-pubescents to practice for their bar and bat mitzvahs. Every Sunday morning extending into the afternoon, first learning Hebrew, then learning the tales of defeat (and triumph in fewer cases) that plagued the Jews for centuries, all outlined in the Torah and taught through worksheets and skits. My weekends emanated the dusky smell of tradition and decay. All except monthly Shabbat potlucks when the smells of roast chicken intermingled with the sweet cheese kugel and the bloodiness of Manischewitz wine. These smells mingled with the laughter of children and the kvetching of adults, dampening the dusk and promising future. 

The library was the most pungent. Perhaps because of the aged books in aged bookshelves, being tended to by an aged woman. The frail old lady, Eileen or Ellen or Agnes, with carrot red hair would read to us as we sat cross-legged waiting for the hours to pass. Excited to educate the next generation of Jews, her passion never knew the wave of secularism fated for society, the dawn of a changing world. I don’t remember when she died, I only carry assumptions that she did.

One bar mitzvah, my family arrived polished and patient for the Saturday morning service that would last half a day. We arrived to find the father holding a bucket of white paint and perspiring. “Just finished painting over a Swastika.” He didn’t make eye contact. I didn’t think to look at my parents to see their reaction. I’d never experienced anti-Semitism before and, seeing nothing, the smell of wet paint on the synagogue wall didn’t penetrate my nasal passage or my psyche as much as it probably should have. I’m not sure if I knew what the Swastika was or the lives lost by the credo it served.

In Autumn and winter, blistering wind shakes branches against worn windows; and if the wood door wasn’t shut tight enough, the wind’s worship would greet pious prayers–G-d joining the service with her own gust. 

Stained glass windows changed through the seasons. Yellow and green streaks stood heavy against the florid carpet during Spring and Autumn. Blue would shine too but only when we stood. Red refracted in the winter. In the spring, we observed Sukkot–a holiday meant to celebrate the harvest but which held no meaning for a modern suburban child. Traditional Jews slept under the hut-like Sukkah with its exposed rooftop; we observed the holiday by trudging outside in the brisk Pacific Northwest air to stand under the slatted roof and play with fruit imported from Israel. I daydreamed of seeing stars between slats, wondering if they would protect me from the heavy blackness of night. Lion King told me those stars were my relatives. 

For Tu B’shvat, we planted trees.  

We had so many holidays. My Christian and secular classmates would pout that I’d miss two school days a year. I reveled in their envy but hid the reality of a day sitting on hardened pews listening to a language I didn’t understand; the clock never seemed to keep pace. Yom Kippur was the day we couldn’t eat, so our sins would be expunged and we could start sinning again with a fresh slate. As a child, I didn’t know anyone who sinned. Rosh Hashanah followed, celebrating the new year, reveling in the traditional apples and honey to prophesize a sweet year. Apologize for your transgressions, then leave them to evaporate as the future focuses.

The synagogue was where I first met death. My greatest exposure to the elderly, I would learn of a passing and wonder why there was sadness over someone so gray-haired and grizzly who’s face creased like the Talmud’s pages. Between passings, we still mourned. Every week, the aura of death would visit as the walls echoed. Ringing like the Mourner’s Kaddish, the only psalm without melody to remind that loss isn’t joyous, the only psalm to oblige a standing ovation when the Torah’s not out. We applauded and we mourned for those who were here and then not.

Cheryl Owens recounted her Texan childhood where racist kids threw pennies at her, daring her to pick them up and prove her Jewishness. Brian Parker always teased me, saying I could smell fallen change with my large nose. We were friends, and we both knew my nose was smaller than his. We teased Emily Martin for being half-Chinese. And Abigail Heringer for relying on a cochlear implant to hear. Of course it was my place to be teased as a Jew. Of course it was that identity that plagued me as different. 

My great grandmother died at the age of 91 when I was eight years old. She was the first death I cried for. I was putting stickers on my bedroom door–a legacy that has remained to the annoyance of my parents–when my sister broke my the news to me. The stickers fell as I ran to my mother. We embraced as we wept. 

For the whole of that next year, we were of the first to stand during the Mourner’s Kaddish. As the rabbi would scan the room, congregation members would share their deceased and my mother would always add Ann Collins to the list for whom the congregation mourned, the cocktail of the elderly or ill who’s physicality had ceased, all representing our collective future. For whom we mourned, for which we mourned.

My relatives came from Ukraine and Belarus. My direct antecedents eluded the Nazis as they fled the Bolsheviks–neither were admirers of the Jews. My mother’s great grandfather hid in a hay bale cart to cross the border; the border patrol’s lazy stabbing of the hay with a pitchfork caught the other fleeing Jews but not him. My father’s grandfather bribed the Bolshevik guards to free him from prison so he could join his family who fled to Canada.  

They took us to the home of a Holocaust survivor when I was 10. He showed us the blackened number on his forearm that had wrinkled with his years. He spoke of the tragedy through resilience and awe as a new generation of the kind that Hitler sought to erase sat on his rug, not only alive but thriving with the lavishness that American consumerism brings. He died before my younger brother could hear his story.

When I was 11, the synagogue changed locations from North Salem–near the train tracks and in the neighborhood where mothers couldn’t leave their purses in the car–to South Salem near the Roth’s grocery store and the boutique pet shop. We were outgrowing our roots and the congregation of the old Episcopal Church we moved into was outgrowing theirs. I used to have piano recitals in the old Church as my piano teacher was a prominent church member. I bragged to my peers that I was well-acquainted with the building we would all come to know. One Saturday, we made local news headlines as the congregation carried the torah by foot across town. My older sister worried she would drop it during her appointed time and would have to fast for 40 days and nights like the great scroll dictates. 

It was several years before the new building attracted a backwards swastika spread across the Southern side in Sharpie. The negligence masked any severity.

My grandma died in January 2021 due to complications from COVID-19. Her death was timely and brought relief knowing that the sufferings of a demented old age would end. We said the Mourner’s Kaddish over computer screens, standing to expose our crotches to Zoom. We couldn’t stand from the pews to announce our mourning, to see the streaks from stained glass fall alone. The building had changed, the rabbi had changed, the families had changed as the years claimed and welcomed more. But we weren’t there, and we weren’t going to be there. 

The old building is now a dance studio. I went in once to pick up a girl I babysat for. While it has transformed, it will forever be standing as a Salem historical site, paying homage to the first synagogue in Salem, the result of pooled savings from our founding elders. Waxed floors and talcum powder greeted me as I entered the great wooden doors at the top of the entrance steps. But the longer I stayed, waiting for the dance class to conclude, the more the perfume of old books crept out from their hiding place, announcing their resilience despite a changing world.

I have traveled without thinking about arriving.
With him, the unfolding was rich with thereness.
 
My father’s hands had broad palms.
 
The road smelled like new chip-seal
where we walked
our socks filled with cheat grass
yellow grass in a snow-patched backdrop
where elks chewed and stamped
sharp, sweet sage shined my skull.

He knew they’d be here
almost clear out to Moonhouse Ruin.
 
I miss the lines
inside my father’s hands

gesturing to the next point in elevation.
He measured the world.
 
I miss it out here, I tell him.
 

On the long road back into town
he asked when I was going to move back home.

He nodded to a low orange planet rising: a star among stars.
 
The purple stripes and clusters that trailed it
seem to only exist out here.
 
The stripe traverses the whole dome on clear nights,
the coldest nights,
down to both ends of the earth.
 
I look up, still not answering.

For over a thousand years, people walked on a trail or network of trails known as The Way of Saint James. By mid-20^th century, pilgrim traffic slowed down to a trickle.  Roughly fifty years ago it began booming back, as part of a global uptick in pilgrimage across faith traditions.

Although The Way began as a religious pilgrimage, and continues to be a means of spiritual revitalization and restored perspective, for many it has become an act of ecotourism in communion with nature; a competitive athletic event; and/or a means of gathering knowledge about the social, cultural, religious and artistic significance of the villages through which they pass. And while a religious network of inns (Gites) exists to support pilgrims, these accept anyone arriving on foot.  Some even accept those arriving with donkeys or horses.

I heard about The Way from a friend. She told me her husband had been trying to convince her to go for years and she could no longer say no. “We went for three weeks. Next summer we’ll pick up where we left off.” Whether or not pilgrims have religious motivations, they nearly always seek healing.

People start from all over Europe. In Germany, people walk on Jakobsweg. In France, it’s le chemin St. Jacques. Four paths cut across France. I took the greenest and most widely traveled route, the GR65, (aka; the via podiensis, the route from Le Puy), which receives pilgrims from Geneva to the east. Many pilgrims do like my friends; walk a stretch, return to their lives, pick up next time where they left off.  I didn’t know but thought that might be what I was doing too.

I visited friends who live near the GR65 before I began. One insisted my walking The Way was imprudent: first, they said, I hadn’t prepared physically; second, my French was inadequate; third, I had no lodging reservations. I blew off the first: I’d been training all my life. I refuted the second: English is the EU’s common language and any two people who want to communicate can get around language differences. On reservations, I said I couldn’t predict how far I’d want or be able to walk from day to day. Millions before me had no capacity to make reservations and accepted “come what may.” I would too. 

I kept wondering, were my friends correct?  I had to stop asking questions. There wasn’t room for worry about arriving in time to hear the bell rung here or to be welcomed as a pilgrim there.  I was walking to restore balance, not by ruminating, not by over-planning, but by surrendering to The Way itself and letting it work its wonders.  Trusting that The Way will meet one’s needs part of being a pilgrim—by definition, a self-imposed exile.

The moment my feet touched down, I felt lighter. I took in a deep breath and let it go, slowly. It was an unusually warm October. I often went hours without seeing another soul. 

The Benefits of Getting Lost

I knew that a white-over-red stripe painted on a tree, rock, fence, or the broad side of a barn meant, “Go this way.” It took me far too long to figure out that a red-and-white X means “Not this way” and a hooked white-over-red symbol means turn right or left depending on a hook’s direction.  There were many times when a “Go this way” symbol wasn’t readily visible or suggested two different courses of action. 

Even though getting lost means wasting footsteps relative to a goal, it has benefits by leading to discoveries. One day, before I knew I was lost, I saw my first porcupine in the wild.  A couple of lost miles later, I came upon the 11^th century chapel of St. Hiliarian. A cemetery abutted the chapel. Both were empty except for a woman who meditatively re-arranged flowers over an above-ground tomb in the cemetery.

Had I not gotten lost, I wouldn’t have come upon the magnificent partly Romanesque, partly Gothic chapel or learned that one of the best places to go when in need of safe drinking water (eau potable) is a cemetery abutting a church. Their water spigots were often worth the trip. One church’s water spigot, accessible to walkers without entering the cemetery yard, was an ornate dragon’s head and the water shooting from the dragon’s mouth was its fire. 

Where Will I Stay Tonight?

While the route is largely set (with accepted variants), I refused to create the sort of itinerary I was accustomed to assembling for family vacations. Doing so threatened a sense of mystery. It violated the notion I was surrendering to The Way.  Conceivably, I could have called ahead and made same-day reservations but I was never entirely sure how far I’d go that day.  And since pilgrim traffic was slow, I figured I’d have little competition in finding a bed. 

One early day, as the sun crested toward the horizon, I began doubting I’d arrive before dark at the convent where I hoped to spend the night. I came upon an old, stone-and-masonry shepherd’s shelter, evidently-abandoned. It had a dirt floor. A concrete bench had a rustic wood-slat top, which at first looked like a tolerable bed. I had a space blanket, but no sleeping bag.  Then it struck me, the bench was habitable for vipers, who’ll come out to play after dark. I re-joined the lingering sunlight. After dark, a 500-year-old nun answered the convent door. After a multi-course dinner, I was escorted up to my 4^th floor bedroom. 

While correct about pilgrim traffic being light, I didn’t take into account that by mid-October most Gites close for the winter, greatly restricting options, especially for late arrivals.  Arriving long after dark and finding all Gites had shuttered, I was once taken in by a priest who had retired for the night. After feeding me, he gave me a sheet of orange bubble wrap to buffer my hip bones against the kitchen floor.  That’s a form that surrendering to The Way can sometimes take.  A pilgrim from Geneva told me she and her horse were taken in by strangers. 

I tried staying in dormitories. Being noisy and up-and-down throughout the night made me a poor bunkmate for the soundest of sleepers. I made a conscious decision to ask if I could pay for private or double rooms, which were scarce. The biggest problem with dorm rooms was that they weren’t designed to allow multiple people to charge cell phones and other electronic devices simultaneously. At one Gite with dorm space for 17, I was one of two lodgers.  My bunkmate was a college student from Japan who was running a marathon along The Way every day.  He’d already worn through a few toes on his toe-shoes. Because it was October, there were five staff and volunteers to support us two. 

Staying Fed and Hydrated

Gites fed us complete, nourishing breakfasts and dinners.  Where Gites left off, people living along the pilgrimage route picked up. Many left out drinks (water or tea) or fruit (apples, pears, plums) for pilgrims. And there was plenty of fallen fruit along The Way too.

Hydration was a different matter.  It was easy to walk hours without seeing a source of eau potable.  To avoid feeling weighed down, I carried relatively little water.  Absent signs vouching for the potability of water, I assumed it wasn’t.  It was ironic that cemeteries were the most reliable source of potable water. 

Keeping One’s Footing

I didn’t know what to expect.  One stretch required a two-hour downhill over rocks used to fill ravines created by rains.  Using the walking sticks unconsciously to make adjustments, I satisfactorily adapted to the role of arthritic mountain goat.  Some stretches of trail looked like stones placed by a performance artist to remind us this wasn’t supposed to be easy.

Chestnuts strewn nearly everywhere required improvising a new dance. I saw old men filling giant baskets with them.  Two pilgrims I met emptied their backpacks, mailed their clothing and other possessions home, and re-filled their backpacks with their precious chestnut cargo. 

Lions and Tigers and Bears

Guidebooks warned of aggressive dogs and suggested use of walking sticks against them.  I was more concerned about feral cats.  In reality, a single dog bonded me most closely to The Way.  A kind-looking German shepherd named Zita led me up a long hill to the chapel of St. Roch and led me inside. Sitting in the third pew on the right, for three minutes she seemed to meditate.  Afterward, I shared some Comte cheese and blueberries with her. I tried saying goodbye, but she wasn’t ready to part.  Over the course of eleven hours, she shielded me from oncoming traffic, caused a charging cow to run off, and guided me through a dark forest.  And, on a lighted, winding road where she was out of her element, I developed a protocol of saying, “Come here now,” and she stood by my side until I removed my “staff” and told her it was safe.  I hated parting with Zita, but that was a condition of the priest’s taking me in for the night.

Human Contact

Along the GR65, long-horned, Aubrac cows provided frequent company and their bells a melodious accompaniment.  However, there typically were few opportunities for human interaction except at Gites and in villages.  Younger pilgrims confided they were going in circles—nothing stuck, they’d hit a wall, felt blocked, wanted to get their bearings, and sought guidance in careers, relationships, spirit. Older pilgrims said they searched for peace, hoped to gain control of a medical condition affecting themselves or a loved one, or sought guidance re-prioritizing now that work and family no longer sapped their energies.  One retired policeman said he walking as a way of seeking forgiveness, “for all the unethical things I had to do.”   

Once, a middle-aged woman in a red sweater ran up a hill, greeted me as a pilgrim, and with her arms reaching toward the sky announced, “Quel Dieu journée parfaite nous a donné!” (What a perfect day God has given us!)  Ritually exchanging “Bonjour” and quick smiles with passing strangers often reinforced the sense of being cut off.  I sometimes had to remind myself, I’m merely a pilgrim, by definition I’m only passing through. As my journey came to an end, I felt ready to become part of the last communities I visited. I talked with students, people on the street, and striking railroad workers about the looming national strike; in turn, they shared with me bread, cheese, and wine. At the end, I had a memorable conversation with two university-educated homeless women, mother and daughter, who after two hours said, “People stop and talk with us because they have need. What is your need?”  (See Sisyphus Issue 6.1, Spring 2019 Wakefulness:  Invitation to Witness.)

It was time to head home, but in my heart, I took the two homeless women, Zita, and The Way with me. Such surrender to place grows on you and calls you back. 

Snakes didn’t bother you, nor gator holes.

You clutched your grandfather’s double barrel
10 gauge, illegal gauge, buckshot loaded.

The black bear was hunting shaggy wild pigs.

You let him pass.

You set into that fog again.

The girl on the other side of the swamp
was all you cared about that day.

Lost your shoes in quicksand.

Your dog lost herself.

A good buck came between two Cypress trees and stopped,
just looking at your two-eyed gun.

“Go on,” you said.

You walked on stickers in the gumbo mud.

After a while you were shaking a little.

You smelled woodsmoke of her old man’s cabin.

Heard his dogs get in a fight.

A whistle came from above. Up in her tree house.

Which was also her brothers’ deer stand.

The ladder was spikes driven into the gum tree.

You climbed like a strong monkey,

wearing your shotgun slung by a knotted clothesline.

“Get in here,” she said, laughing.

Published by Blue Light Press, November 2020

      Paper  $18.95

Reviewed by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Lucille Lang Day is a many faceted poet—at once worldly and soulful, scientific and magical, political and personal, a story–teller and a lyricist. She can be serious, humorous, down to earth and ecstatic. The Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place— her most recent book—is divided into two sections. In the first, Foreigner, we travel with Day and her husband in Latin America—Mexico, Costa Rica, The Galapagos—and to Europe— Greece, France, Spain, Holland, Italy. A stranger in these worlds, she uses her capacity for precise observation mingled with sensual pleasure, empathy and visionary illuminations to make lucid word portraits of faraway places. Having been to some of the places she portrays, particularly San Pancho, I can tell you that she catches the soul of that sweet little town by the sea in the title poem, as, just after sunset, the egrets rise on their great white wings and settle in the coconut palms.

The second section, Between the Two Shining Seas, is a more conflicted endeavor, exploring the sense of place in our own land, haunted as America is by the theft of indigenous homelands, and the genocide that underlies our history. Some years ago Day learned that she has Indian ancestors from the Wampanoag tribe in the North East; this knowledge has strongly influenced her recent work. This section opens with a long list poem, which names the states of America, exploring their etymology. Most are of Indian origin. What emerges out of this slow, methodical naming is a devastating portrait of the decimation of Indian tribes, lands, customs and languages. Two examples:

Indiana, Land of the Indians—the Delaware, Piankashaw,
Kickapoo, Wea, Shawnee, Miami and Potawatomi—who
mostly removed by 1846
 
Kansas, the Dakota word for the South Wind People, whose last
fluent speaker of the Kansa Language died in 1983

I’ve been following Day’s writing for two decades and never cease to be delighted by how her poetry expands its range and deepens its emotional reach. Her background is in science, she has a doctorate in science/mathematics education. She’s always been a wonderful storyteller with a biologist’s eye for the right detail and ear for appropriate nomenclature. She’s always been funny and self–revealing. But in recent books she has developed a profound voice, which does not fear to enter the realm of the mysteries, the provinces of unbearable grief, or the wild leaps of her own imagination which can turn a poem about the birds in San Pancho into an unexpected and soulful prayer to join those egrets as they rise into the branches of the coconut trees after sunset.

                        Oh, to sit up there too—
safe, having eaten my fill—with
folded wings, watching over creation.
 

“It Matters”

 The opening poem in the book, written in San Miguel de Allende, uses anaphora and listing to powerful effect. Written in concise unrhymed tercets, the short lines give us the sky at dawn, the flowers, the jacaranda leaves and the bells of La Parroquia. We could be watching a movie, when suddenly, in the sixth stanza, the poem makes a turn into personal reminiscence:

that even here I remember
my father’s laugh and the weight
of my mother’s disappointments

In Day’s world things matter. This stanza follows two about a gnarled woman beggar. Both the beggar and the memory of her parents matter. The latter stanza lasts for just a few breaths and we are off to a lyrical description of the stars which “burn through the sky’s dark cloth/no matter what I call them.” The poem’s speaker seems to be arguing with her scientific self in favor of metaphorical knowing. In the following stanza Day’s humor shows up as she leaps from considering how delicious the prickly pear cacti are, to the Big Bang theory, which “defies/common sense and intuition.” The poem follows the movement of her mind as the speaker considers how science understands the origins of the universe, while her down to earth self argues that it makes no sense. It matters what science says, but it also matters what common sense says. The poem ends with a prayer for:

                        the boy playing
with a stick outside La Casa Rosada;
 
that he never have to hold a gun
and the bells always reach his ears,
pulsing through clear morning air.

This vivid poem sets us up for many of the pleasures of Day’s poetry in this volume. Though Day often writes free verse, she also plays with form. I counted three formal sonnets. She uses stanzas, anaphora and listing in a formal way—a way to structure her poems. In this poem the title phrase, “It Matters,” is repeated soto voce, giving us a string to gather in one glowing necklace all the diverse jewels of what matters in this moment, to this foreigner in San Miguel de Allende.

Day can make deep dives into the personal, the tragic, the unbearable, as in the poem “Hologram” which moves seamlessly from her daughter’s appearance in a dream, in which the poem’s speaker has to remember that her daughter is dead, to her memories of her child as a toddler, to the murmuring of the sea she hears from her B & B in San Pancho, to memories of “all the long months of chemo…,” how she held onto her daughter’s hand, and urged her to “Hang onto hope, as though my love could/ scratch a diamond or hold back the night.” Diamonds are important in Day’s inner world. In the final poem of this collection, the journey is summed up as “a sack of diamonds.”

Over and over Day proves herself a master of endings that gather up the complexity of a poem and tie it together in an elegant knot. Often her humor is her brilliance, as in “Inauguration Day in the Galapagos,” in which the speaker takes an excursion to see giant tortoises, or goes off to visit “dark marine iguanas” and sea lions, rather than join the herd watching the inauguration. One word in the powerful ending opens up the political point being made: “and the insistent/surge of the imperiled, luminous sea.” Day is a passionate environmentalist. She has co-edited a remarkable anthology, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. In this part of her journey her concerns about climate change become overt, as in a poem named “Global Warming in the Galapagos, in which she wonders what will happen:

Without the trees, where will red–
footed boobies with blue beaks
build nests…? 

Day cares about red–footed boobies being able to build their nests; she cares that the boy playing with a stick never have to hold a gun; she cares about remembering her dead daughter as a mischievous toddler, cares that the sea is imperiled and luminous, cares that creation continue its beauty and intelligence. Reading Day, we feel how profoundly, it matters.

The Old Gods are Gone

In Europe Day delights in wonderful meals, and swims in myth. “Dining Alone in Athens” begins with “sea bass wrapped in vine leaves, served/ with white wine sauce and olives” but moves swiftly into the realm of the old gods, the “Temple of Zeus on the field below,” and Athena who “planted the first olive tree here/in a contest against Poseidon, whose magic/was seawater.” She sums up the loss of the gods, who have retreated to museums, in a few rueful lines, but closes her poem with the story of the goddess, who planted that tree of whose fruit Day has just eaten, and “holds her own against the sea.” Athena still lives in poetry. Day has a way of bringing the ancient world to life. In many poems she visits museums and rescues the ancients. A nineteenth–century shaman, in a glass case in a museum in Paris, begins to stamp and drum in “Evenk Shaman’s Costume.”

Let there be magic! A dance
in a sacred grove, to cast evil spirits
from bodies, retrieve stolen souls. 

Poetry, in Day’s devoted practice, often turns magical. This is especially true in her ekphrastic poems—inspired by art. In “Dinner in Barcelona” a delectable description of a meal is followed by a transformative experience of the arts:

Gaudi’s pillars branch like trees
in La Sagrada Familia, Miro’s
moons and stars hang in many–
colored firmaments, and guitar
music rises toward the ceramic
roses on the Palau’s ceiling,
each note luscious, true. 

What is the purpose of art, if not to transform experience?  What is the transformation of experience if not a kind of magic?  Poetry’s magic in this art inspired poem channels Gaudi, Miro and guitar music into a many-colored firmament of human creation.  

In “Artists at Chauvet” Day enters the cave in which our Paleolithic ancestors drew animals in charcoal. The poem’s speaker inhabits the consciousness of one of these artists, looking at his own handiwork—his drawing of a horse. “The artist/ must have surprised himself/by its perfection.” The magic of this poem recreates the experience of seeing those cave drawings, the artist’s reflections on mortality and the sometimes immortality of art, as we the reader travel back over thirty thousand years to stand with our ancestor and reflect that this marvel: an “astonished horse—/galloping through the cave past/stalagmites and stalactities with bison,/aurochs and rhinos—would survive.” The artist is the ancestor of all the painters and sculptors Day visits in her poems, and clearly she claims him as her own.

A darker magic haunts the poem “Falling in Florence.” It begins with a list of all the places in which the speaker, “a clumsy woman,” has fallen, considers the family history of myasthenia gravis, a disease that “causes/ muscle weakening and makes/one fall,” pans in on the exact moment of her fall “on Via Cavour/in Florence after sharing a quatro/stagione pizza with my husband” when she was thinking of the Mocking/of Christ, a fresco painted by Fra/Angelico. We spend the last third of the poem in the painting, which is strangely surrealistic:

A disembodied male head
in a hat, blowing something
on Christ’s face.  Is it water
or spit or words of contempt?
I wondered.  And then I fell. 

No theories or psychological interpretations of the fall, with all the meanings that word has in the Judeo–Christian tradition. Just the plain facts. And the space given the reader to wonder how that terrifying scene at the heart of the Christian mystery, could knock a tourist in Florence off her feet.

I Encounter My Soul

Day’s poetic magic takes on the task of self-transformation. That spiritual uplift is elegantly evoked in “Oasis,” an alchemical brew of science, soul, outrage and humor in which she encounters her soul “just before it leaves the party/ at 33,000 feet where/ the dead do as they please.” She questions meaning in a universe where “the President brags about/forcing himself on women.” She finds it in the rapid heartbeat of a hummingbird, and in the miraculous moth of consciousness that finally gets into the “gunman [who} decides/not to shoot after all.”

This theme of joy and praise for the natural world is carried on through poems about children: “Last Day of Zoo Camp,” which lists with delighted details all the fauna the children have encountered, and in her two poems about her young grandson Devin, who announces, in “Beauty and the Boy” that “He wants two children, a boy and a girl/he’ll name Golden Spider and Red Spider.” It continues in “I Am Amazed,” an ecstatic list of amazements from the largest: “the Arches Cluster, the most/crowded place in the Milky Way” to the smallest “a molecule of ATP, which/carries energy to all the cells” to the human: “a boy and a girl…/who spot a speckled woodpecker…//igniting a blaze of amazement.”

In a glorious poem that follows, the speaker becomes “redwoods and rain,//generations of ancestors//”the great-grandchildren/who may or may not be born.” In a profound twist her final poem “Going” questions the first poem in the collection, “It Matters,” in which the speaker lists many detailed things that matter. By the end of the book the poem’s speaker is not so sure about what matters. She confesses: “I always used to think I was going somewhere,” makes a list of all the places she thought she was going, and ends with the soul stirring realization:

Now I see all destinations as stepping stones—
just temporary stops until the last
the journey itself a sack of diamonds
all journeys as one journey…                                

That sack of diamonds—the 74 poems in this collection—created by the pressures, the joys and sorrows of the journey—a long, deeply lived life—is a bag full of treasure.

Blake peered out the aircraft window at bloodshot clouds backlit bright by the falling sun, eyes locked on the variant reds, appreciating their brevity. Soon, only pale pink wisps remained. Within the soaring tube of steel, furnished with composite walls, flooring and upholstery, he considered his fellow travelers.

All were united in this ocean crossing, yet each soul unique, following its own flight path. To his left was a middle-aged man in a tailored gray suit, whose white shirt cuff was tinted pink by the residual twilight. Since boarding, the man hadn’t spoken a word, or even made eye contact. But neither had Blake.

Blake said to him, “Heading out or returning home?”

The man hesitated, looked up, and said, “Are transient acquaintances of any value?”

Blake said, “Do you ever admire a sunset?”

We have built a fence and gate
to keep animals in, people out.

I think about water that once flowed
through the dried-up creek bed,

and the tree that stands a century old,
sentinel perch for generations of ravens,

and the hubris of thinking it “ours.”
If I could keep it wild

I’d have my ashes spread in the holler
beside the horse we buried,

in view of the pasture and mountains.
Once we’re gone from this place

it will likely be sliced into parcels
like servings of cake.

Wild red currants in secret clumps
in the shade of downed trees will be stripped and

the pasture carved into a “subdivision” with
new fences and gates.

Then I will rise to ride the bones
of the old horse up the creek bed,

thirsty for the water that once
ran clear and free.

There’s a small island of plant life a few blocks from our house in Seoul. The contractors of an apartment building constructed it many years ago, a concrete triangle twenty feet to a side. Within the triangle are two yew trees, grizzly and malnourished, and five or six shrubs. The ground sprouts with clover, tendrils of vines, and a flower or two every other spring.

“Here my aunt once found mugwort and took it home to her kitchen,” my wife tells me. She grew up nearby and was explaining how this island of plant life—these two yews and six shrubs—were like a forest to her in her childhood. She said she would lose herself under their canopy until her mother or grandmother down the street called for her to come home quick.

“This was where we learned the smell of soil and the taste of grass. Where we saw birds and sometimes mice and imagined dog prints to be wolf prints or at the very least deer. Where we watched one generation of plants succeed another, and insects lead grotesque and otherworldly lives. It was where boys practiced their baseball slides and kicked up clouds of dirt. Where there were trees to measure up against, places to dig and hide, things to be sought and caught. In the presence of spiders and the prospect of snakes, it was the jungle of our fears. And yet, alone and uncertain, it was the grotto of our hopes.”

It’s true that even a single tree in the city changes everything. A group of them and you can picture yourself in the Taiga. But while all of that was very nice, I told her it was hard to ignore the cigarette butts, the glass cola bottles and candy wrappers half-mummified in the dirt.

“We considered those artifacts, remnants of humans of lost civilizations,” she explained. “Anyway, you don’t have to tell me what a dead space this is. Even at that age we knew what it lacked,” she said on reflection. “And yet we made it enough.

*

The preschools in Seoul are easy to identify. Amidst the drab grays and whites of the housing landscape, the preschool offers a palette of primary and tertiary colors. I stop before a local exemplar and take in its details: a red mail slot; a yellow door; windows stuck with whale stickers; through the windows green balloons; outside a plastic slide, a sandbox in shape of turtle; a sugar maple; a cat that comes and goes; next door a neighbor’s garden, with squash vines writhing through a chain-link fence. (If lucky, a flower will fruit on the playground side and the children watch it grow.)

But there is something shabby and forlorn about the place which the colors cannot mask. Defects and deficiencies, limitations of the confines that are all too clear: the windows grimy; the sandbox muddied; the slide soiled and stunted; walls and fences; a single tree. Do the parents shed a tear dropping their children off come morning, knowing this the world they offer them?

And yet children, their imaginations swelling, make castles of hovels. (You have to hand it to them.) And passing years of their childhood within these walls, they’ll remember well their surroundings, imprinted with them as they are. Decades hence they might even yearn for these very environs—like salmon seeking their spawning ground—yearn for them with a vague but poignant wistfulness. The red mail slot; the yellow door; the whale-stickered windows and green balloons; the turtle sandbox and plastic slide; the maple and the cat; the chain-link fence.

*

On the way home from work I found myself following the same route as a mother and her daughter. The daughter was old enough to walk, yet young enough to enjoy the comfort of a stroller when the mood struck. By slowing my pace I was able to observe them from behind for several blocks.

While the daughter was up and on her feet, I watched her stop and examine a row of wayside flowers. I approached the flowers in her wake. She had good taste. These yellow heads were of rare charm: not loud or garish, but simple and unassuming. Fragile, yet festive. Not beckoning, but lying in wait like a journeyman’s lost coinage. Moreover, their deep concavity spoke of an inner strength and mystery that I identified with. (The postscript to this scene is that, passing a few days later, I saw that the flowers had fallen.)

Back in the stroller and cruising by a duck restaurant, the girl asked her mother about the Chinese characters that appeared on the wall menu inside. Her mother explained that the characters are used to designate portion sizes: small, medium and large. Seeing the character for “large” or “great,” the girl extended her arms out wide, which is exactly what the ideogram’s form (大) is based on—a man with outspread arms. Greatness, we are right to conclude, is a liberal embrace.

On the same block as the restaurant was a wallpaper and matting store. The girl must have mistaken the wallpaper rolls for arcane literary scrolls, for she asked her mom how old “these books” were. Or at I least I think she did…. It’s possible I didn’t catch her words well enough, and mistook them for something I had hoped to hear.

“Is this place selling plants?” she asked of an adjacent store. Again she was thrown off. In fact it was a clock dealer, but the proprietor had such a mania for plants that he overwhelmed the store with pots big and small. One had to give him credit, however, for creating a rather surreal and dreamlike space, a space whose merging of machine and Mother Nature seemed to suggest that life ran like clockwork.

A shoe repair store lured the girl out of the stroller and up against the window pane. When her mother told her that the store’s name was “The Shoe Hospital,” she began to feel bad for the footwear convalescing on the rack and, turning to her mom, asked if the shoes’ owners would come back once the shoes got well again.  As the mother-daughter dyad moved on ahead, I came up alongside the window myself. Some in pairs, some singly, the shoes sat there like synecdoches of their owners, revealing something of their identity and individual crotchets: the harried woman’s high heels; the pious man’s loafers; the oxfords of the footloose youth….

There’s a very small shop on the corner of the block, an alcove really, no bigger than a kitchen pantry. The space is so cramped it looks out of place amongst its broad-shouldered neighbors. A sign on the door says it’ll soon be out of business.

“I want to sell ice cream here!” says the girl.

“I want to sell books here!” thinks I.

In truth it would do well as an Indian tea stall or Arab apothecary. This man sells house paints.

We turned up a side street. If not for the girl’s lively eye, I would have missed the kaleidoscopic patchwork quilt hanging on a clothesline in the shadowy gap between two homes. She also shed light on an empty taxicab parked in a private garage, surprised that taxi drivers drove themselves home.

“Do they have to pay too?” she asked.

After getting up to study the deer antlers mounted above the doorway of an herbalist’s, and after tracing the arabesques of an iron railing with her index finger, the girl returned to her stroller and finally appeared to be falling asleep. Anyhow it was time for us to separate, I to the left and they to the right… not unlike the antlers branching in two.

Ah, but wait… she was awake and sitting up again. And she was pointing again, pointing up as she drifted away. Following her finger I saw a flock of geese carving the sky overhead.

“What are geese doing in Seoul?” she asked, adding, before her mother could answer: “The sky looks like a rhino.”

And she was right. Her description of the pockmarked patterning of the clouds was spot on, if you’ve seen rhino hide up close.

Left with that observation, I continued to look up at the sky as I made my way home.

It was a beautiful sky, the cumulo-seraphic clouds now a rococo glow of pink and golden orange. And though the girl wouldn’t have seen the beauty in it that I saw, I suspected that today’s sky would stay with her somewhere, latent inside her, setting a standard of beauty against which she’d measure all future skies in years to come.

The quiet is too great, precious city.
Each day seems New Year’s morning
where unneeded traffic lights blink as
Hopperesque streets endure fog until
sun brings the afternoon’s pastel glow.
Commerce absent, the golden promise
dwindles as parks fill with the fragile
and destitute. A ceaseless hangover,
testimony to disease not celebration,
endures. There is nothing to salve
my eyes from graffiti on boarded up
stores and unmoored people asleep
on your streets, this fierce epidemic
surges unbested, erasing normal ways.
Memories of street protest, love and
joy are chimera. A draining mournful
inwardness has replaced your vibrancy.
Uncertainty crushes spirits of those
unable to kindle hope and possibility.  
Impatience haunts others who cherish
all that is free and open in your being.
I hope this terrible waiting ends, it is
too soon for you to be locked in amber.