GRIM REAPER

At the beginning of summer solstice,
the tall grasses sizzled in the morning heat,

that snapped and hissed like snakes as I swung the scythe. 

When the shining blade bit hidden metamorphic stone,

the pendulous power reverberated back up the arm like an echo. 

My flanks and arms ached with the long history of a slow dance,

as I wielded the ancient tool, unchanged since the Middle Ages. 

Soon the horses will come down to graze on the bright grass. 

The stout oak-handled scythe, long since replaced 

by a plastic lime green battery-powered strimmer, 

to fell the wild oats and rattlesnake grass reaching skyward.

After a long, wet winter, they are taller than me.

The horses are long gone, at night the deer will browse 

and check on my slow progress as I clear the upper fields. 

Generations of tree swallows attempt to return to the eaves, 

sealed off for decades, genetic memory that deeply embedded.

The crows are upset because I put up the summer tent,

at dawn they share raucous displeasure from the safety of trees,

a hawk circles the deep valley and keens for her lost fledglings, 

the woodpecker drills and probes the depths of the dead pine.

Douglas firs grizzled with lichen, encroach upon the vestiges 

of open space where my grandmother once tended the garden.

Poison oak and coyote bush protect saplings of live oak and pine.

I wake to a primeval silhouette of bachelor deer on the tent walls.

Last winter, a limb from the dead pine sheared off the corner eave 

of the old house, leaving it raw and exposed to the elements.

Nothing much left of the garden except volunteer cherry plums, 

a dying pear tree we cannot save, even with severe pruning,

and the golden delicious apple tree is so far gone, 

only a thin cambium ribbon threads the roots to branches, 

the heartwood of the tree exposed, hosting shelf fungus,

the black cankers having already done their job decades ago. 

How many decades are measured in this garden, the cultivation 

of lifetimes, but the wilderness returns of its own volition.

THE DANCER ON THE LEOPARD ROAD

—an ekphrastic poem after DCastro's The Dancer

The eye of the sun leopard follows the dancer,
her saguaro arms raised high, the oculi, the false eyes,

like oilspots on the road, follow her every move,

while ox-eyed daisies sway in the aqua air 

filled with dreams of red jalopies of another era 

that take to the skies like a swarm of bees 

seeking a new home on the horizon. 

The open road disappears into the distance 

mountains pierce the sky, letting all the air out 

until we droop like flat tires waiting for a bicycle pump

to clock a little more mileage under our belts. 

The hazel-eyed sun and its sunspots—beauty marks—

watch us as the exuberant dancer cartwheels up the road. 

But there are also ghost dancers on the plains. 

A woman carries a parcel while her sisters rise up 

like a dense winter ground fog hiding in the rushes. 

And the dancer on the leopard spotted road 

with her three legs, and starburst chamise,

is prancing like a runaway circus pony, 

while spinning vortices or black holes 

are waiting to draw us all in.

6/7/24 CPITS workshop with Jessica Cardenas Wilson

The detritus of memory

Lately I’ve been writing this story in my head from the days before I became a writer, always reminding myself to remember, remember. Whether it was the way the fog rolled in over the mountain, with its chill breath, or the litany of things I saw during the day. Wild animals carried the highest tally, or something my grandmother showed me: how to build a Saint Bridget Cross from the tule rushes that grew in hedgehog clumps following the water table in the upper garden.

I’ve been writing this since I first began to wander afield, collecting an inventory of plants I had no names for, leaving off from where my grandmother, no longer able to accompany me on our early morning walks, no longer instructed. For example, the names of plants. I had to wait an entire lifetime to label and categorize them. All of those jigsaw puzzles of memory became placeholders, waiting for identification, for what knowledge I did not yet have a place for in my head. My eyes remembered those nameless plants, I tucked them away in my mind, a treasure chest to unpack at the end of a long life.

I’ve been waiting for the circle to find its beginning and end, the Ouroboros of memory and history jockeying for position during those liminal moments where you’re neither neither awake nor asleep, where dreams and reality merge like mist, and you can’t tell where one memory or dream left off and another one began.

I’ve been waiting all this time to live my real life, though I’ve been living it all along, but it always felt like it was on hold, waiting for the right moment. What right moment? Maybe it was because I was afraid of change and caution was my handicap, I was always keeping things in obliettes because nothing is ever guaranteed, other than life nor death—other than the struggle between the here and now and the there and then.

Lately I’ve been sharing the stories of the past with new old friends, thinking surely that wasn’t me I was describing a lifetime ago. The inside and outside worlds colliding, head on, and I wonder about all those dropped stitches constantly unraveling the tapestry of our lives, those dropped threads leading us in other directions.

Lately I’ve been gathering in the narration of a life hidden in the dungeon of memory, wondering why I am still here. It seems like there is little to look forward to, but then I realize it’s a habit I’ve dragged with me from the earliest days. The if not now, then when, the what if motif of regret. But there is always the now.

Lately I’ve been collecting the detritus on the shores of darkness, finding odd solace there. The creatures I see become unnamed talismans: a lizard, a young gophersnake or the tree swallows seeking the eaves of my grandmother‘s house. The vents were closed off a half century ago, but home is genetically imprinted in their memory banks, and though untold generations have come and gone, they still swoop and practice landing, banking upward only to be met by steel mesh. I remember the day their babies fell out of the nest and we found a tall ladder to return them to the eaves and the inconsolable parents, swooping and crying.

I am lost and have no ending for this piece. The mosquitoes have been drilling into my forehead, reminding me of the fallout of a wet winter.  I can’t stop thinking about pipevines, for example, the only source of food for the pupae of the rare black swallowtail. How slender the thread of life is. Or the return of the bluebirds after a half-century of absence. The partial reversal of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Near extinction is always at hand.

Lately I’ve been letting go, perhaps returning to the void where we no longer matter. As I face the deep grass of the upper field that must be cut before the arrival of summer, is a race against time because after a long wet winter, the grass is still too wet to cut. And when I when I was young, weed-eaters didn’t exist, so I used a scythe—that father time image—and that zing and waltz of felled grass became an ingrained song of the field..

Lately I’ve been remembering about all the almost lovers I was too afraid to let in, let alone, to let out. I mourn for my amethyst earring gone missing—something I’ve had since I was a teenager, whoever finds it will not know the stories it carried from Inverness. Or the ring of Italian gold, the band so thin after a lifetime of wearing it, like a shaft of sunlight, the chip out of the stone reminds me of a playful kick meant for my rear from Neil as we walked about around above Lake Merritt. I should have left him then, but I waited 20 years to make a move. I wear it to remember, and the pungent odor of wcut grass brings it all back home.

6/6/24 Write On! with Susie Terence

SEEKING PARADISE

Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can see the landscape, 

how it once was before civilization tamed it. 

I imagine my eyes, focusing split-level, 

like the eyes of gobis, mudskippers and frogs 

as they navigate the twain worlds of water, mud and air. 

Call it split vision. Or invoking the ghosts.

Seeing the dual landscape was a coping mechanism, 

something I had learned at an early age—

while trying to plumb the old stories of then versus now. 

A distant then, a then that never was 

in the case of fairytales and myths 

harkening back to another age, 

another era where anything was possible.

Call it paradise, or call it a garden 

but even that is a tamed landscape.

Sometimes it’s like a time warp. 

For example, the land of my childhood,

before the houses, before the invasive species, 

both plant and animal. I imagined 

vast tracts of land, the hills painted with wildflowers.

Or Hanamua Bay before the coral bleached. 

It was a veritable garden from whence we came.

But then the tourist arrived in droves and loved it to death. 

In fact, we have gone and loved the entire world to death, 

it is like an addiction, seeking out paradise on the brink.

And then we lament and wonder why it’s no longer pristine.

And we have only ourselves to blame.

5/22/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen 

DEATH IN RAGS

See how Death is depicted as an old woman, 

dressed in rags, old beyond reckoning, 

from beyond the borderlands of time, 

always waiting in the wings 

like a carrion bird patrolling the land 

for those too young to know that their very lives 

depend upon camouflage or divine intervention. 

Pity the mother holding the child against the wind, 

not the east wind toward the birth of dawn, 

not the west wind to the end of the road, 

but to the north, where the chill winds,

unseasonable in late spring 

slither across the corners of the soul 

seeking prey among the fallen, 

especially those sleeping rough in the streets 

and those plagued by disease or the infirm. 

But sometimes she hunts for live prey, 

more like the eagle, not the vulture 

waiting to give us wings to those unwary souls 

who think she is a myth that time forgot.

5/7/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen 

EL MITAD DEL MUNDO

We were driving after dark, always a risky business in the deserts of Baja California, but we were caught between villages. We thought we were invincible on the gringo trail thinking we could outpace the darkness. First, it was an overturned truckload of jicama roots, like hundreds of blind eyes or small moons seeking orbit. Then it was the donkey crossing the road, then a red steer. Our headlights cut through the darkness like kitchen knives. The stars were brilliant this far from civilization, only darkness and the weeping stars to accompany us the shoulders of the narrow road with potholes large enough to swallow the VW bug. it was a slalom course. And, the headlights were a skein of light cutting the darkness into pieces. Something striped with an impossible long tail—an escapee from a Dr. Seuss book—ran in front of us, and there was no time to swerve, no way to avoid it on the raised road bed, a slender thread built for flash floods, was like a dyke. The wheelwell thump told us it was not a lucky night for that creature. My first and last sighting of a cuatamundi, the felling of a rare animal beneath that carnage. then it dawned on me the warning not to drive after dark was equally dangerous for the local animals as well. 

4/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen

My 2024 CAC artist panel application

Note bene: Each year I reapply to be a CAC panelist and each year I never get selected because—I’m a white older woman? Elder warehousing? This year I was solicited with no less than three emails from the CAC urging me to reapply, saying I was in the panelist pool, so clearly I was accepted in the pool for previous years, but was never chosen. Each year the application form shrinks so we have fewer and fewer words to deliver our sales pitch. This year it was less than 2500 words whereas last year it was at least 3000 characters. I had to get inventive to squeeze it all in. All this on Leap Day! Ribbit.

Because I’ve worked as an artist in residence most of my life within diverse communities, I’ve a unique viewpoint as to what makes for a good CAC-AIR grant. Having written scores of grants I know what to look for as I’ve been an artist in residence for the NEA, Montana Arts Council, Oakland Arts Council, KQED-AIR, so I have direct experience with a broad range of artist grants & organizations.

 I’ve taught artist-in-schools residencies in rural & urban schools in California since 1979. I’ve implemented arts programming, trained poets & artists in rural Sonoma Co. & urban Alameda Co. Clients include inmates at Napa State Hospital, elders, preschoolers. I’ve had 7 individual CACAIR grants in Sonoma & Napa counties & grants from the Montana Arts Council.

I’ve administered/taught in CAC multi-artist residencies including Poetry Flash (current), a PBS/KQED AIR grant, & two Oakland Cultural Arts Council grants. I’ve mentored/ trained artists, writers and teachers through several arts organizations including California Poets in the Schools, Young Audiences, Artists in Schools of Sonoma County, and Rural Arts Services.

I’m widely published & won prizes, fellowships & awards for my work. I was a photojournalist for alternative newspapers, writing arts & feature stories. From 1980 to 1997, I produced 100s of literary events in Sonoma Co., for Russian River Writers’ Guild, Sonoma State University, Johnny Otis Club & other venues. I was staff photographer/ workshop leader for Napa Valley Poetry /Bahamas conferences. My photos will be featured in an upcoming Julia Vinograd film.

I’ve worked in Bay Area schools, teaching poetry & art to historically underserved students in Oakland & Hunters’s Point, developing culturally relevant arts programming. I’ve worked with many cultural demographics with a diverse language base & cultural focus, including training Middle Eastern and African health care providers to teach creative writing to their clients. 

Though not fully bilingual, I speak Spanish & can converse in several languages. I also volunteer at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center working with elders. I am a coordinator & current coordinator and emcee for the annual Poetry Flash Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, as well as administrator of the Poetry Flash CAC AIS John Oliver Simon Legacy Poetry Project grant.

I’ve taught clients in a diverse range of communities of all ages/abilities throughout California. The sites are historically underrepresented in all the arts—I utilize poetry & language from their respective cultures. I also invite guest artists & poets from the community. For example, at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley, we developed a long-term poetry & art project that celebrates racial equity, diversity and inclusion.

Baby wood dragons

So last week, I was teaching poetry to fifth graders, some of whom I have known since kindergarten, but haven’t worked with them in a few years, at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley—when I mentioned the four elements and the six Chinese elements for our I Am poetry prompt, which led circuitously to the upcoming year of the dragon. And I said, I’m a dragon, I was born in the year of the water dragon, and many of the kids raised their hands and said, We are dragons too. OK so our calculations may have been a tad off, but that’s all right. And then I thought, here I am teaching poetry, kindling the imaginations of baby wood dragons. The next generation to ignite the world.

Bringing in the sheaves

The flashing colon on the face of the digital clock, the way afternoon light illumines the frosted windows, the demanding cat wanting breakfast early, clearly not on daylight savings time. Explain that to the horses or the dogs if you have them. Time racing ahead at breakneck speed the older you get, the faster it goes..Time was once measured by water clocks, or nails embedded into burning candles that fell on the hour. Iron clattered onto the table or the stone floor, like tiny hooves, sleep disturbed by time. The monks were obsessed by time, for the world revolved around increments of time, because the universe would not hold, because God, hungry for dogma, needed constant assuaging and reassurance in the form of prayer from his followers. They were marking time for an inevitable future that may or may not come. The Medieval Book of Hours was a guidebook of feast days, measuring the seasons. On what tombstone, what prayer was etched in stone? The laws of oscillation, the guard rails of our lives keeping us in check. Time is cyclical, or perhaps it is a sickle, Ceres bringing in the sheaves.

1/17/24 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Measuring the sun

When I was a child, my grandmother measured the seasons by where the sun rose on our hill, the long ridge served as a fulcrum. In summer, it rose over the big rock to the north, and in winter over the tall pines along the fence line. In this way, we measured the seasons using the natural world, not man-made monuments. I was fascinated by the way sunlight raced along the tiles by the front door. Ours was an old house that kept to the old way, with the house aligned to the cardinal directions. So the morning sun shone through the front door, like a portal, or one of the gates of Stonehenge. We even had a big rock, a knob of limestone, or a chert reefer, perhaps blueschist sticking out like a menhir. She carried the old ways with her, the stones circles of her childhood landscape conflated with portals of time in the new world. I was an odd child, always measuring the world by criteria I didn’t quite understand. One morning, I got the idea to measure how the fast the rising sun over the ridge rose, so with my plastic ruler, I measured the speed between sunlight on tiles versus the advancing shadow. Each line on the ruler was a two-minute marker. I had half the equation but not the other half. In that moment, I realized how the shadows of a sundial worked, and suddenly I was connected to time in a timeless manner. Past and future fell away until there was only time present.

1/17/24 Write On! with Nancy Woo

BETWEEN AIR AND MATTER

When words barely scratch the surface, 

like a swimmer, frog-kicking across the pond, 

when dark things call us into the shallows, 

like watercress, pondscum, or duckweed, 

not the mauve flowers of the water hyacinth 

depleting oxygen from the waterways 

until fish drown in their own element.

The quick movement before a splash, 

a frog jumps, coming up for air, gasping, 

straddling a world between air and matter.

1/10/24

DURING THE FIRST DAYS OF THE YEAR

I am in love with the way light falls 

on the transom of frosted glass, 

late afternoon, illuminating the room, 

the transient sun reminding us 

it hasn’t forgotten that spring 

will again return like so many others, 

too many to count. 

I count the days where winter’s sentence 

will give way to longer days 

and soon we will find the time 

to complain about other things. 

That is our nature, always looking ahead,

anticipating the next move 

like a game of chess where the battle 

of nights and days are played out, 

an old scenario. 

To wait like the cat for first light, 

to curl up like that in the sun, 

to absorb the warmth, 

to be fully in present tense, 

not worrying about the next move, 

for the game is constantly being played out 

over and over for the illusion of our benefit. 

That urge to impose order is divine, 

a random universe is our lot. 

Does the cat on the windowsill 

worry about such things? 

I endeavor to be more present, 

not to fall into the veil of the future, 

because it is always running 

out ahead of us like an escaped horse 

fleeing the barn, not wanting to get caught 

up in plans that we have no control over.

1/10/24 Write On! with Susie Terence

The age of the self disguised as an uncertain future

The cat seeks wild water,

    she doesn’t care     where 

or what     is found. 

For her,      everything 

   is in time present.

No matter what     my age 

   I am like a baby     on a runway.

I can’t walk, it seems 

        I am always

 learning to crawl,      then run. 

Then, fall     again. Again.

I scroll my name,

     a calligraphy of clouds 

across an uncertain 

    sky.         The journey 

is always running 

    up against     itself 

in a crowded elevator. 

        I am the agoraphobic 

in the marketplace 

and I steel myself 

    with florid words 

and no one notices 

    my breath     trembling 

like unseasonable leaves 

on a lone tree. The winter 

    is a demanding bitch dressed 

in fancy ribbons and bones. 

    Bless the living 

and the dying of the past 

and the future is a war 

that never ends.     The thing is, 

    the journey is always 

in front of you.     How 

    do we cope 

when the chains 

of change     attempts 

to escape the sordid

confines 

            of the past?

12/27/23 Write On! Nancy Woo

GIVEAWAY

For instance, my floor is covered with discarding clothing, 

of other selves, Goodwill bound. I take photos—for taxes, I say. 

The 1920s tuxedo with its silk lapels, victim of catering ventures, 

next to bright summer dresses, tropical sheaths that held promise,

the blouses and over-shirts that shielded shoulders from the sun, 

the closeted unmentionables that kept the wobbly bits in line,

old knee braces, banished to the discard heap. The things we rescue:

a dress is given a last-minute reprieve, perhaps to be repurposed. 

Yet I know I will probably never wear its next incarnation.

The urge to hoard facsimiles of texture and floral meadows 

is entwined with memory—for a future that will never come. 

None of us knowing if distant visas of summer will arrive. 

Call it Covid, call it cancer, or fate striking at any given moment. 

Call it a Thanatos approach to death lurking in every corner, 

this moment shapeshifting, perhaps severed from chronology, 

with only a handful of digital photographs surviving the tangible.

Last night’s rain on the roof is already a distant memory. 

Today arrives like a knife. As we approach the long shadows of solstice, 

winter grips our breath as we steam ahead—locomotives of a lost era. 

Meanwhile, the chains in the bilge of the coffin ships of self 

remind us the death knell of distant bells is playing a dirge for the soul.

12/13/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo

NAVIGATING THE STAR ROADS

I imagine tomorrow’s house as a place 

of four walls invoking the four directions, 

instead of the sagging skirt of this tent. 

A roof, where stargazing is mandatory, 

where we once again travel the Milky Way, 

Orion’s sword cleaving the winter sky, 

though my eyes are always in need of reading glasses, 

to navigate the labyrinth of words that deluge us daily.

For a moment, it comes into focus, and I rejoice.

I may not be able to align a triple junction of tail-lights 

while driving down the road, astigmatism’s gift,

but for a moment, a constellation springs into focus, 

the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, the Gazelle Leaps. 

Once I could see more stars with the naked eye, 

like the time we hiked up Mount Whitney, 

and the Milky Way was truly a sea made of stars. 

Or as we gazed up from the loft of the Andes, 

the sky was occluded with wildfire smoke, 

so I wasn't aware the constellations had shifted. 

A consolation was a glimpse of the Southern Cross.

The Big Dipper hovered on the horizon 

like an afterthought pointing to the direction of home.  

But I’m thrilled that I can find any constellation 

at all in a vast wilderness of sky lonely as ice. 

When the Big Dipper emerges overhead from the blur, 

it steals my breath away, and once again, 

I can find true north within the void, 

not easy to do in a sky filled with industrial light, 

not like the dark nights of childhood, where stars 

shone with a brilliance rarely witnessed. 

All the cells that I have ever been in the past, 

are annealing the starlight like folded iron 

at the smithies forge into a sword of light 

as I fathom these four walls called home, 

then I realize that the idea of home is held 

deep within the memory of self.

12/6/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo

At Lake Merritt, on the morning of my 70th birth, 11/24/22

Last year, on my 70th birthday I was housesitting, waiting on a balcony by the lake, which was really a slough—a brine estuary glistening with adamantine stars in the hard winter light. I watched the early joggers pass by in slow-mo, their breath visible in the crisp air. And the small red hands of maple leaves, exhausted by all that applause with the wind, they danced down the footpath, across the sidewalk, and flirted with the dangerous wheels of passing cars. We waited for the windsongs to arrive, but the clouds cast their tarot cards on the mirrored lake, as wild geese patrolled the surface like U boats. I drew the hanged man. Some war was brewing, but there was yet another war in progress. Story of our lives. No escaping it. Once Iraq. Then Ukraine. Now, Gaza. The war against nature is a war against the self. I was so near, yet so far from home, that the words never came. I was mute. As if I were never born, as if the wind never had given birth, though this lake was once my constant companion, my familiar, perhaps even a muse. I remember one birthday as we circled the lake—maybe 10 years ago—for I measure this friendship in decades—I once saw what I thought was a white arm reaching out from the water, and I thought, Lady of the Lake. But it was the jawbone of a horse, or mule with large yellow teeth like pawns on a chessboard. Not a sword. No warrior heroes. No dragon quests. Its mate, long gone, much like mine. Has it really been five years? I leaped from the stone gat into the water to retrieve a story of the past, imagining a wilderness of horse-drawn carriages disgorging their bounty from a distant time. Pierced by an arrow of light, I could only imagine my Saggitarian kin, the dance of their clattering hooves on cobblestones, a type of music locked in the distant past. A sound that still stirred the blood and made me remember the names of my dead horses, the memories I harbored during that supple time of youth, when we rode out into the mist, seeking the glimmering light. And the articulate wind was singing, singing to me, a melody of the cosmos on the day of my birth. But I could not celebrate this turn of year, for I had no words left to mark the occasion. A slender silvered fish leapt skyward, as if attempting the rudiments of flight.

11/29/23 Write On! with Susie Terence 

FIRST LIGHT

Once I held a dream of hope, 

a child looking forward, 

like a horse eager for the trail. 

Once I roamed the fire roads, 

and the backcountry above small towns, 

where the morning fog 

was a lid on the Pandora’s box 

of what was to come. 

Once those ridges held me 

like a mother to child. 

I knew no other home 

and I became a song of wind and sky 

as I traversed those ridges above Tomales Bay 

a sword gleaming in the distance, 

a path of light dividing the lithospheres. 

I didn’t know the wind was a poem,

was also a prayer as well as a road. 

There was only now. Always 

the now, even back then. 

Am I a prayer of the past, 

a prayer of the untrammeled land, 

a prayer of time anchored in memory, 

like a flag full of promise?

I mourn for those islands of youth, 

carefully folded into time, 

distant memories, reimagined 

and tailored to fit the present. 

How do I tell that child 

alone in the wilderness 

that the darkness of this world 

is a lens occluded with sand and grit. 

Call it despair. I am a prayer. 

Let the moon traverse the sky, 

where Orion keeps his sword 

sheathed for an eternity. 

Let the flags of peace be of hope 

to those in war-torn countries. 

Call it Ukraine, call it Palestine. 

It doesn't matter where.

A child once said to me: 

any step toward war is a wrong step.

The fallen children 

who will never again 

gaze upon the restless sea, 

who will never get a chance to share 

the occluded memories of old age,

because in wartime there are no victors. 

Only the wind whispers 

our names as broken prayers 

tangled in dark forests, 

greeting the first light.

11/22/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

The second age of light

I was never much good at hiding the truth, the open book of my face gave away more than it concealed. I never was a good shield, perhaps, because I was also very good at ferreting out the secret assignation and foibles of adults. Lord knows there were enough skeletons in the closet.

After Chernobyl blossomed, I could not hide my dismay when the rains came. The scientists said the cloud was too high in the stratosphere and it posed no danger, unless it rains. And despite all odds, it rained. And so we stood under the portico, listening to the rain. 

And that realization as I avoided the rain, that even the roof of my car offered no protection from the isotopes falling from the sky. This was nothing like what happened at Three Mile Island. That spring of 1986 was a time of no birdsong. 

What could I possibly tell the children when they asked the hard questions that even the scientists sidestepped during this newest age of light?

With an angry child, seeking revenge, said we oughta nuke those Commies, I said, do you think Soviet kids want to nuke us? And at that moment, the doors of perception opened a crack to let the light in.

11/15/23 Write On! Susie Terence

Writing for peace

On the day of invasion, a rabbi wrote a poem, taking the side of peace, no matter what side. But peace is a victim. Susie said to write a poem, personifying peace, hope, war, death, then dress it in garments. I think of the tallit and the hijab, the keffiyeh and the kippah. Neruda said death was dressed as an admiral. All I could think of were those tall ghost ships sailing into port, where the dead gather on the docks to welcome home the fallen. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote about pigeons and peace, clouds and refugee camps, he was a candle in the darkness that is Palestine. I think how we’ve suffered but, there are invisible bars that hold us in check, no matter what our beliefs. My grandmother said a country without a tongue is a country without a soul. I can’t think help but think of Darwish, a poet who spoke four languages who lived in exile all his life. He wrote: you are my country but I am a stranger stripped of identity. He said Hebrew is the language of love. A love divided from itself. Brother against brother. We are alone in our self-imposed exile. The prisoner said to the interrogator: My heart is full of sage, the remains of dawn, as I walk outside of my own being. In 1984, when we invaded Lebanon, I read Darwish‘s poem about the conference of the birds, and wrote a poem called Death in Lebanon. His poem is no longer on the Internet. The birds have flown. Einstein said to prepare simultaneously for war and peace is a non sequitur. A child said it to me more succinctly: any step towards war is a wrong step. What is the color of prayer, of death? What happened to: Love thy enemy. Darwish was once in love with a Jewish woman, but he was an internal refugee in his country of origin. He said: Without hope we are lost. His name means the wanderer, it also means poverty, but he did not suffer from a poverty of words. His words were a rallying cry. He carried his country within him always. In Paris, Beirut, Moscow, Cairo. He said: I am robbed of my ancestors’ vineyards. Now, nohing is left of his homeland except the thirst of mortared rocks that hunger for peace. Despite past atrocities, peace is always a gift. Where does peace begin with me? Peace is dressed in the feathers of doves in Gaza, and Ukraine. These days we are all living in the crosshairs of the unseen sniper.

11/8/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

BUILDING A WALL

Build a wall made of dusk and old saguaro lace, 

sew it with threads of tumbleweed and twilight. 

Then weave it into a net to catch the errant stars 

as they cross from one no man’s land into another, 

marking that liminal shore, where the voices of dreams 

become tangible, where the ragged mouth of time 

bends to its own vagaries. Tells us stories of the old ways.

A wall, where the past and the future merge 

into a shoreline where it is always now. No borders.

Nothing is written in stone. The old stories of sand 

at river mouths whisper a journey of unimagined time.

Let the river touch the sea until sea and sky become one.

Call off the coyotes and let the voices of the wind 

travel through razor wire, and border crossings 

unimpeded by politics and greed. We are all immigrants 

traveling to one promised land or another.

Make it not a wailing wall. Make it a singing wall 

filled with the wings of prayer rags, and the gods of hope, 

where the vagaries of war smoldering on battlefields 

and contested borders becomes a thing of the past, 

where the politics of religion no longer divide us,

and we move free as the clouds on the horizon.

11/1/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

 (I was channeling Padraig O Tuama’s collects.)

Published in June/July 24 issue of Sonoma County Peace Press