Like for so many the pandemic lockdown forced a deep reckoning of my life's journey thus far. Those weeks surrendered indoors, I considered my emotional, spiritual, physical worlds and also less taxing, practical aspects of my life. I became a cleaning devil, purging kitchen cupboards, thinning closets, streamlining garage and book shelves.

Scrutinizing my closet resulted in the awareness that I dressed in large part imitating a version of cool I adopted back in my college days. Now at my current age surely an outdated version of cool. Certainly, someone else's version of cool. My wardrobe told me that I wanted to look smart, sophisticated. It told me that I wanted to look some version of a writer—Don't ask me which writer because I would not have known what to say, still don't—I could not articulate a specific person but I could identify a color: black.

For far too long my clothing choices centering black garments chased an idea predicated on a kind of negation: If you dress in black, you are a "somebody," you "belong" in some smart club, if you fail to dress that way ... then never mind you. 

My wardrobe told me that I sought approval. I wanted to belong. And yes, clothing is one way humans for millenia have announced their belonging to ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and many other groups. In those cases stitch patterns, paint patterns, thread colors, garment shapes, announce belonging to a collective. But my effort was an individual search. Mine was a lonely endeavor to belong to a class of people.

COVID changed my priorities. I realized that the club I wanted to belong to was the club I wanted to belong to, not the club I thought I should belong to. 

There was plenty evidence among my things that color and embroidered textiles are important to me. I've collected colorful huipiles and rebozos for years. I own shoes, skirts, shirts in bright saturated colors and intricate patterns. What changed during the lockdown is that color took center stage. I did not want to use my colorful clothes to accentuate black outfits, but to make them be the outfit. 

I wanted my clothes to say, I am alive! I am alive! Not, "I'm trying to be smart." And if that earned me the epithet of eccentric, odd, badly dressed, "crazy lady" then so be it.

I wanted to wear clothing with handmade details, wear designs are steeped in tradition and story, wisdom, and joy.  I may not understand the intricate significance of each detail in a huipil, but the garments and the colors link me to the native peoples of Central America from whom I descend.

This desire to live in color, to be affirmed by it, reminded me of Celie in The Color Purple. To feel alive and feel God's grace on my face on a sunny morning, or be refreshed by cool sand under my feet, to say Yes! to a tomato, to marvel at a patch of zinnias, or a field of heather, to let color enter me, is to feel the deepest belonging.

5 feet over, under, swimming the swim of life

 

 

After two and half years away from my local pool due to COVID closures I went swimming again today. It was heavenly.

Swimming is the one constant form of exercise I have done for most of my adult life. I love the meditative aspect of it: the rush of water above and beneath me, the counting of strokes, the focus on breathing. I normally begin with slow laps letting strength come to me, which invariably does. Somewhere in the middle of my swim my limbs find speed and strength and I kick and pull harder and faster. It is a delicious moment to arrive at the peak of my physical power. 

Today standing in the shallow end of the pool catching my breath after a spirited lap, I took in the peaceful scene: the lifeguard in a white t-shirt and red shorts looking bored and sitting on the tall chair at the deep end of the pool, crates at the sides holding noodles, floaties, fins, and other gear used in classes, the smell of chlorine suffusing everything. Surveying the space I delighted in it, smiled, even gave myself an imaginary hug.

The memory of me and my younger sister walking to swimming lessons back in El Salvador arrived unexpectedly. We were thirteen and ten years old respectively. Nothing about going to the gym for our lessons was relaxing, peaceful, or safe. My sister and I could have been killed on the way there or back. El Salvador then was at war with itself. Yet once we jumped in the pool the terror of the civil war fell off from us and we became like kids everywhere else, full of joy and eager to learn the different strokes our earnest teacher taught us.

Maybe that is why swimming has been such an important ritual for me over the years. It is a reminder that I did not die. I lived. My body lived, and on a day like today, a nothing special day, my head realized what my body has known and remembered all along.

Here is a poem that tells of walking to swimming lessons all those years ago in El Salvador. It is taken from my new book of poems Cipota Under The Moon from Tia Chucha Press - out in May of this year. Just two weeks away!

Garrison

Two girls slinking alongside barbwired brick walls on their way to 

swimming lessons, doing their best to remain collected past the turrets 

stationed with armed soldiers. Ensconced in their lookouts, the troopers 

 held their metralletas close to their bodies, as if they loved them, but not 

so much they would not use them ill. After our lesson, we headed home 

the same way we walked to the pool, guillotining chatter and laughter, 

 scurrying along the garrison’s walls. Only the sound of our flip-flops 

striking our heels betrayed us. What if today’s soldiers were in a foul

mood and pulled their triggers? What if they noticed our bulging bags, 

our weekly comings and goings, and tagged us as informants? What if, right 

leg, what if, left leg, we got through it that way—like prayers in a 

rosary—one bead, one foot in front of the other, one bead, one foot, 

one bead, one foot all the way home.

From Whidbey Island

This post first appeared in https://wapoetlaureate.org

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

This is the first full week of school for my children who started their new grade levels a few days after Labor Day. It has not been easy rallying them out of bed after throwing bedtime routines out the door for a few weeks. To enjoy the summer break late in August we travelled to Whidbey Island, even taking our 5 chickens along. We’d hoped to visit Useless Bay every day as we have done in years past, but poor air quality due to wildfire smoke kept us indoors lamenting what could have been.

One of the smokey grainy mornings on the island I braved sitting on a porch to do a bit of writing. I’d read earlier that after 17 days of carrying her dead calf in mourning, Tahlequah, the orca whale, had finally let go of the corpse. Staring at a blank page, watching azure skies channel through a clump of heavy hydrangeas heads, my thoughts drifted to the hundreds of children separated from their mothers and fathers, alone, afraid and withering in ICE detention facilities. If an animal deeply mourns the loss of her offspring as Tahlequah has, then imagine what the thousands of moms and dads that have lost their children against their will must be feeling? What torments might they be going through? And what of the children’s experience? What do their feelings portend?

Immigrants are leaving El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, on foot, in great numbers, women and children, men and children, children alone. They are leaving because of unprecedented violence from gangs that had their origin in the streets of Los Angeles, they are leaving because of poverty, because they have zero prospects for earning a living, and they are also leaving because of environmental degradation. This summer, El Salvador experienced extreme heat and the longest draught ever recorded. For millennia predictable rainfall from May to September has nourished corn, beans and squash –the triumvirate of the local diet. This year the entire annual production of subsistence grains has been jeopardized because of abnormal high temperatures and lack of precipitation.

Could it be, I asked myself sitting under the eerie sky, feeling the itch in my throat increase from breathing the ashy air, that the orca in Puget Sound is connected to the lost corn, squash and beans in Central America and to the hundreds of children holding on to themselves in ICE facilities?

My meandering brought me to Chief Sealth’s speech of 1854 where he addresses the interconnectedness of all things. There are a couple of versions of the speech, but in my favorite one which you can watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9a70fz6420 he states, “We are part of the earth and it is part of us […. ] Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it – Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

In early August I had the pleasure of traveling to Vashon Island to a reading organized by Merna Hecth, the Island’s Poet Laureate. There I read with Shankar Narayan, a Seattle based poet originally from India. Shankar shared a poem with us that evening that has haunted me ever since and he was ever gracious to le me share it in this forum.

From Whidbey Island, to the Salish Sea, ICE detention facilities, Central America, India, Vashon Island, to Seattle, “Every part of the earth is sacred,” as Chief Sealth once said.

The Times Asks Poets to Describe the Haze Over Seattle

No one asked me, but I would have said this apocalypse

looks like home. The laureate

says a grey gullet has swallowed

a molten coin, another calls it powered cadmium

and cirrhosis, dystopian, grotesque, a crematorium. Yes,

all of these describe my Delhi, and which

of my well-meaning friends will understand

that for a week now I have woken to the warm nostalgia

of exactly the familiar cataclysm that hangs

there every day as I imagine Hiroshima’s

mushroom cloud might have done before dispersing into that dead

silence? Every sunrise and sunset so brilliantine,

and like the finest earth-to-table restaurant a new recipe

daily for the fresh soup of toxins, the plastic mill, the pyre

ground, the matchstick factory where every day five year olds blow off

fingers. There has been no blue

for years. No, these are not things to be proud

of, and looking up at this brown smudge of a Seattle

sky I know I should look away, feel for evacuees and ashed

homes and bear and deer and antelope, but

in the confusion of entanglements holding my life

together I cannot say what’s catching

in my throat, am I now animal remembering how once I would run

in Delhi, laps around that little brown park

with its mongooses and illegally grazing buffalo, before the haze

pressed in, caught into its creep my blackening lung

and squeezed, or is my animal

brain transported to another home on days outside

those twenty-one per year I am allowed

to be my other self, exhale into just another no-different

anonymous body, or is my animal howling

to dam the forgetting when breathing clean so long feels like birthright,

blowing down all those accidental animals, of whom I

am one, whose water is hauled from Cascadian streams where no one

may so much as dip a grimy toe, whose children will never leach carpet-factory

mercury into their bodies, is my animal screaming

blue murder that if some can’t breathe

then none shall breathe, my asbestos lung rasping

to anyone in this town who will listen— this is how the world

lives. And there is nothing that cannot burn.

Shankar Narayan

"She Who Shines For All"

This blog post first appeared in the WA State Poet Laureate Blog https://wapoetlaureate.org

In May I travelled to Snoqualmie to the Black Dog Arts Cafe home of the Black Dog Arts Coalition to dedicate their poetry pole. The sun was out that afternoon for the first time in a while engaging in spectacular fashion the light greens and deep greens on either side of I90. As I climbed up to the pass, leaf, branch and bark seemed to rejoice, as I did, in the lovely spring light.

It could not have been a more perfect day to celebrate the value of words and the importance of community. Inside the Café I read poems and said a few words that the existence of this carefully chosen log, would over time serve as gathering place for thoughts and sentiments lovely and otherwise, thoughts articulated with care and deliberation. After the remarks, those of us who chose poetry over sunshine went outside, sat on the deck and one by one read the poems we’d brought to offer the pole. I include two of the poems down below.

In the meantime, I know of a few other poetry poles in the state: on Vashon Island,  in  West Seattle and the mother of poetry poles, the one who has inspired others in Selah, WA. This pole is the work of Jim Bodeen, founder of Blue Begonia Press Poetry Pole

“The Pole is energy, She Who Shines For All, from nine kinds of flower, the single poetic theme of life and death, the question of what survives after the beloved.”

Jim Bodeen

Poems From Snoqualmie’s Poetry Pole dedication: 

there is a charm in verdigris

my breastbone shatters

against the memory

of you.

you — of goldfinches

in the backyard who

once were chickadees —

you crack me open

and i weep

as you make a

daughter

out

of me.

– Lily Renner

SAD LISA

The tune blows hauntingly from my soul

The exhalation of life’s young breath spent

Tender ears hear the beauty of sorrow incarnate

Weaving of melody with heart’s pained yearning and learning.

Repeated

Each refrain calling

Drawing inner world to sound

Exquisite ache reaching down

The poignant frailty of strength

Knowing – flowing through the simple clay.

Repeated

Each chorus building

Mightily shaking with grounded emotion

Ebbs like the ocean, mounts a wave

Spirit grows luminous, years and tears

Pushed out in a breath, released to the ears.

-Sheri J. Kennedy

Please let me know if there are poetry poles in your community that I may add them to this blog post.

National Put A Poem In Your Pocket Day

This blog post first appeared in Seattle School of Visual Concepts Blog

April is National Poetry Month; across the country there are festivals, readings, workshops, and write-ins that celebrate the power and beauty of words. As Washington State Poet Laureate and as SVC’s Designer in Residence, I created a project to acknowledge the month, and April 26th in particular, which is also known as National Poem In Your Pocket Day.

With abundant help from SVC’s staff; shop director Jenny Wilkson; my Letterpress 2 instructor Amy Redmond; teaching assistant, Chris Copley; and SVC office assistant Carrie Radford, I printed 2,000 miniature letterpress broadsides. On each was a poem, in both Spanish and English, titled “El árbol dentro de mi / The tree inside me,” which will be distributed today by independent bookstores across Washington State.

Michelle Carranza, an 8th grade student at Denny International Middle School in West Seattle, wrote the poem. For the past four years, I have been teaching a series of poetry workshops in Spanish at this school. For the month of January, we wrote poems exploring ways in which humans are interconnected with the natural environment.

Choreographing my right foot, my right hand, then my left hand on the treadle-operated platen press for hundreds of impressions, I was minutely aware that much time had lapsed from the morning in which Michelle, sitting in a bright classroom, wrote the first draft of her poem. The words, thus arranged in this particular composition, travelled a long journey from Michelle’s imagination to a page of college ruled paper, to a relief printing plate, and to the Neenah paper that was their final destination.

Standing at the press, I understood that printing is much like writing a poem. They are both inexact sciences, driven by the mystery of intuition, overseen by the ruler of all things: time. What I mean to say by “inexact” here is not that precision is optional in a printing run. On the contrary, one cannot serialize something that was not exactly measured so that each document is faithful to the one before. The ability to replicate is, after all, the revolutionary power of the printing press. What I mean to say is that in a letterpress print run, adjustments need to be made every step of the way. Human hand and judgment and exquisite tinkering, are needed to attend to all of the details involved: mixing inks to obtain the desired hue, obtaining the right amount of pressure from plate to paper, etc. Said another way, printing requires time. Lots of it.

Unbeknownst to us when we admire a poem — its voice, form, rhyme, content — we are also paying tribute to Mother Time. Poets spend hours, sometimes years, working with a poem to reach full expression of the thing which intuition sparked. Likewise, when we admire a hand printed object, time is one of the components inherent in our admiration, whether we are aware of it or not.

The poem could not be shaped, the printed object could not be created without time’s filaments threading through them. Time hangs from every letter like dew hangs at dawn over every blade of grass in a spring meadow.  Human awareness is needed to create and to behold that something eternal and unmeasured, that thing that catches our breath, that thing we call art.

El árbol dentro de mi

En el río de los recuerdos
las raíces de mi árbol
buscan la seguridad
de un lugar de siempre
caras familiares
amigos del pasado
el tronco fuerte y alto
resiste como un faro
la tormenta de pensamientos
no se deja caer
aunque las olas
lo empujen y empujen
entre el vacío de las palabras
y el silencio de mi cuerpo
aún asi, mis ramas tratan
de alcanzar una aventura
lejana entre planetas y estrellas

Michelle Carranza
8th Grade
Denny International Middle School

The tree inside me

In the river of memory
the roots of my tree
search for security
yesterday places
familiar faces
friends of the past
my trunk, strong and tall
resists like a lighthouse
thunderstorms of thought
it refuses to fall
even after
wave after wave shove it
between the emptiness of words
and the silence of my body
even then, my branches clamor
a far away adventure
among planets and stars

Translation Claudia Castro Luna
WA Poet Laureate

Between the rails of the printed page

This blog post first appeared in the WA State Poet Laureate Blog https://wapoetlaureate.org

I recently had the honor of meeting Governor Jay Inslee at his office in Olympia. Our appointment, which was made weeks and weeks in advance, was for 10:30 in the morning.Outside on the Capitol Plaza cherry trees were in bloom and spring’s verdor was eminent on tree branches all around. When I walked in to his office he was sitting at his conference table reading Emerald City Blues, one of my poems. We launched into an easy conversation about poetry, he asked about the latest trends, we talked about what had inspired me to write the poem on his desk.  At one point I mentioned that the Washington Transportation Department had recently held a haiku contest that I judged and explained that the winning haiku would appear on the Ferry Summer Sailing Schedule.

He looked at me and said something like, “Let’s write one!” Before I could respond, he was gazing out the stately window and in the next second his pen was gliding across the page in front of him. He looked up once to verify the syllable count. In a swift minute Governor Inslee had composed a perfect haiku.

Ode to brilliant spring

Hangs on tip of alder branch

And falls at first dawn

I admired his agile mind and his ability to quickly descend into the internal quietude needed to walk into a poem’s territory. I wondered how many Governors had the temperament, talent and graciousness to sit and compose a haiku in the course of a busy morning. Not many – I am sure. As the Poet Laureate I thought how very fortunate for us poets and for libraries, universities and schools across Washington to have such a person hold the highest office in the State. I recently had the honor of meeting Governor Jay Inslee at his office in Olympia. Our appointment, which was made weeks and weeks in advance, was for 10:30 in the morning.Outside on the Capitol Plaza cherry trees were in bloom and spring’s verdor was eminent on tree branches all around. When I walked in to his office he was sitting at his conference table reading Emerald City Blues, one of my poems. We launched into an easy conversation about poetry, he asked about the latest trends, we talked about what had inspired me to write the poem on his desk.  At one point I mentioned that the Washington Transportation Department had recently held a haiku contest that I judged and explained that the winning haiku would appear on the Ferry Summer Sailing Schedule.

He looked at me and said something like, “Let’s write one!” Before I could respond, he was gazing out the stately window and in the next second his pen was gliding across the page in front of him. He looked up once to verify the syllable count. In a swift minute Governor Inslee had composed a perfect haiku.

Ode to brilliant spring

Hangs on tip of alder branch

And falls at first dawn

I admired his agile mind and his ability to quickly descend into the internal quietude needed to walk into a poem’s territory. I wondered how many Governors had the temperament, talent and graciousness to sit and compose a haiku in the course of a busy morning. Not many – I am sure. As the Poet Laureate I thought how very fortunate for us poets and for libraries, universities and schools across Washington to have such a person hold the highest office in the State. Read the Governor’s proclamation for National Poetry Month.

Between the rails of the printed page

This blog post first appeared in the WA State Poet Laureate Blog https://wapoetlaureate.org

This week libraries across the country are celebrating National Library Week. We all have read, or heard, stories of how libraries have literally saved people’s lives. Those lives were perhaps mired in difficulty and libraries offered a way to engage with new ideas, imagine possibilities and experience lives different than their own.

Growing up in El Salvador I did not have any public libraries. I knew there was a National Library in San Salvador, the capital. There were probably libraries in larger towns, but they were not easily accessible nor part of the collective consciousness. My father and mother, both teachers, were avid readers so I was lucky to have many books at home. They showered me with books they thought useful for me to read. They signed me up for a Book-of-the-Month Club through which I read Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Juan Ramón Jímenez, and many of the Western classics. It was not until the fourth grade when I attended a school run by American Maryknoll nuns that I had access to a children’s library for the first time. The excitement on library day was palpable. Every week we selected a book of our choosing without any adult mediation. Such freedom.

Libraries are mothers of love in my opinion. Everyone is welcome to the books on their shelves and the worlds, ideas and feelings within them yield their riches equally to all who take the time to read them. With our taxes we contribute to their existence and in turn reap benefits beyond what we individually could afford. Avarice and knowledge hoarding are anathema to public libraries; libraries keep the flame of democracy alive.

The poem that follows is one of three I wrote for Seattle’s Public Library while serving as the city’s Civic Poet. Whenever I share it out loud, I introduce it by saying that I don’t write love poems – or have written very few – but this is definitely one of them.

Ode to Library Books

Because more than ink glints beneath the rails of the printed page

Because like snow flakes, each person’s hands profile unique lines

Because every time a library book is borrowed, lifelines overlay each other

Because borrowed books bear fingerprint constellations on their backs

Because on borrowed pages we leave something of ourselves behind as tender evidence

Because fingerprints remain as glaciers remain in the valleys they carve

Because imagine all the points of connection

Because older hands may yet find their youthful versions on the cover of the same book

And because over the same borrowed book, neighbors not on speaking terms may still shake hands amicably

Because books visit our homes and witness the contents of the bags we carry

Because the trouble we would be in, if library books could talk

Because hand upon hand built the seven wonders of the ancient world

Because in a city of almost a million, chances are we’ll find each other first on the pages of a library book

Because from hand to hand, home to home, library books map the city

Because a hand that turns pages of a book collectively owned feeds a gracious and gentle    thing, a communal spirit whose wings span over park benches, over streets and p-patch plots, affirming dreams and daydreams alike, hatching songs that pour and cycle over us all — like spring’s pollen and winter’s rain.