—Poems and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA
WASTELAND?
Pond’s a drained teacup,
no-man’s land. Dried mud, sun-baked
jigsaw puzzle whose
pieces don’t interlock, don’t
fit together—hard walking.
What will be hidden
when pond fills again with rain:
great circle of rocks;
a history of trees—their trunks
many years submerged. All dead.
But look, young willow
colonizes with lush green
thicket for autumn—
thriving in a dry teacup
and all alive with birdsong.
STONES ON THE HILL
for Matsu and Okei, Wakamatsu
Samurai helmet in gray-green stone
juts from the summer-parched grassy field.
Cattle graze. Wind plays a whistle-bone,
the song of life, of earth’s harvest-yield.
Her gravestone faces both ways, a choice.
Samurai—in life and death her shield—
ten years wages spent to give her voice
in white marble on the western hill.
Now, in oak’s leafless boughs, birds rejoice
the season. May’s lost, it’s had its fill.
November gives hope of first-rain’s sound
on stones that mark what’s been lost and still
remains—remembrance—and blessings found.
Dry pond’s sudden green of willow, sly
colonizer of least-promised ground.
As wind and birds mark the changing sky,
Earth harvests seeds that live, husks that die.
HARVEST ECONOMY
Motherlode hardpan, stone mixed in,
and where’s the soft spot for growing?
Unnamed weeds have taken ungrazed
pasture where we used to mow and
windrow, stack for winter fodder.
When the Harvest Moon stared down,
folks would labor late into the night.
All that unspent light. We’d look up
and love that wonder of a sky
not paid for, just given.
HARVEST BOUNTY
Curtains of sunlight swirled with gold motes,
oat-chaff, seed-heads. No Sunday rest
from daily chores, livestock always hungry.
She paused at the haystack piled so high while,
in their pen, sheep clumped together at manger
and goats watched with their elliptic eyes,
then scattered as super-abundance of haystack
avalanched down, burying the girl who fed them.
BURN TOLL
Wind pushes down the chimney,
it wants to bring fire into our house
while, on TV, Paradise is burning.
This state so flammable—in 1856,
our downtown burned three times;
the Bell Tower our famous landmark,
its warning, a monument to fire’s toll.
Fires even fiercer now. Listen for latest
estimates on TV: homes, lives.
Listen for sirens down Green Valley.
The chance of wildfire
is always close. Listen to the wind.
SLEEPING WITH FIRE
Know the wind better than your closest kin.
Love nothing combustible. Repeat your history,
don’t write it down. You’ll know what’s
important by what stays in memory.
Finally, names outlast faces in the photographs,
packed up, ready to run. Flames are brighter
than anything you could conceive.
Love nothing but it burns.
Today’s LittleNip:
MORNING NEWS
—Taylor Graham
Wind ripples dry grass
alongside the path, whispers
to a grand old oak
overlooking green pasture—
a new calf’s soon to be born.
_____________________
Our thanks to Taylor Graham for her portraits of our dry land and the fires that rage through California! She writes that “an earlier version of ‘Sleeping with Fire’ was published in Sonoma Mandala a long time ago—written for a small fire across our canyon up the hill, just days before the Berkeley-Oakland Hills firestorm."
Visit the Central Library on I St. in downtown Sacramento today at noon for Third Thursdays at the Central Library poetry read-around. Then drop in at Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Cafe in Sacramento tonight, 8pm, for featured readers and plenty of open mic. Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about these and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.
—Medusa
“A new calf’s soon to be born.”
—Anonymous Photo
—Anonymous Photo
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa