Güd wrtr

Your maroon nails accent the new blue pen
as it scoots across the pages of a petite

notebook, one each for you and your
classmates brought by two visiting

writing ladies who have set you all
to making lists of possibilities.

You do not hesitate; you dive into
the cool water, into that bubble

where all sound vanishes and almost
without effort, letters spill from

your fingers, turn into words, into
sentences, stories, poems. What

you see on the page surprises you.
Creativity pulses to the surface like

lava, burbling hot as the sun, explodes
with joy, sometimes fountains with rage,

rising and falling, eventually settling,
cooling into rugged mountains of

potential that call you to explore
with pen in hand, to trust this

endless source always within you,
with luck, for the rest of your

wonderfully wide-eyed writerly life.

•••

(for the writing workshop students at Bradshaw Christian High School,
Sacramento, California—from the writing ladies, Jan Haag and Jill Batiansila)

Has rolled off the U.S. Mint
assembly line in Philadelphia,
presumably with others
of its kind, though, as its
New York Times obituary
noted, it was more or less
worthless.

“Not even penny candy” can
be purchased any more with
the thin pseudo-copper coin,
having long since given up
up most of its precious metal
in favor of zinc-coated steel.

Still, the penny “was the going
rate for thoughts,” its obit said.
“It could sometimes be pretty
and other times arrive
from heaven.”

And though some 250 billion
of the Lincoln-faced discs
still exist, that they cost more
than 3 cents each to make
spelled their doom at age 232.

I think of you, my dear, jingling
the once-ubiquitous pennies
in your pocket, sidelining
a particularly shiny one
to place in my palm each time
I cut your hair. It’s still my
going rate—a penny or a kiss.
Nowadays you generously
deliver both.

And I, along with so many of
my fellow Americans, have
mostly taken for granted
this tiny bit of legal tender
like so much of what is fast
disappearing from our world.

I vow to stop each time I spy
a penny on the pavement
and pick it up, regardless of
how much in-God-we-trust luck
it might or might not deliver
for the rest of the day.

I promise to cherish its
enduring legacy—Liberty—
embossed near the spot on
Mr. Lincoln’s head where
the bullet must’ve gone in.

Long may equality, freedom
and justice for all somehow
survive in this land still
filled with so many of the tired,
the poor, the huddled masses
yearning to breathe free.

(for Katie O’Rourke)

The Garden Goddess on the corner
is collecting the fallen, arranging
the downed and brown around
the base of a tree and allowing it
to do what comes naturally—
turn itself into compost.

“You make your own dirt,”
observes a woman who likes
to periodically drive by
the GG’s corner to appreciate
the profusion of plant life, as I do,
awed by year-round cosmos,
by hydrangea blossoms
in November.

The GG nods and smiles.
“Yes, I do,” she says, citing
the money-saving benefits
of homemade dirt.

But I think she is offering
more than beauty on her corner.
She reminds us that, in this
season of releasing, of letting go,
the fallen become compost
for new growth later.

And that, if we can be persuaded
to loosen our tight grips,
if we can interrupt hate with love,
we can watch life grow from decay—
someday participating in that
bit of recycling ourselves—

if we just get out of the way.

For a true contemplative, a gratuitously falling green leaf
will awaken awe and wonder just as much as a golden tabernacle
in a cathedral.

—Richard Rohr
from “A New Cosmology: Nature as the First Bible”

•••

This is where I worship,
awakened with green awe.

So much of what I am made of is here:
under old oaks with long-reaching arms,

some with trunks as thick as elephants’
legs or even their stout middles,

craggy-barked oaks with long limbs
and spindly digits that touch the ground,

undisturbed, untrimmed, losing bits
of themselves gradually, often in storms,

but mostly standing tall and strong,
silent sentries for 100 years or more.

Here I sit in the sanctuary of my people,
the ones who brought us to this place,

now the companion spirits who join
these oak ancestors to call my attention

to a choir of bird song and insect hum,
punctuated by the percussion of a solo

woodpecker. This is as holy a place
as I have ever felt, where the beloved dead

linger in the long shadows and late light
of a warm November afternoon,

the sun lowering itself, as I do, into
fresh grass risen green by recent rains.

I don’t want to miss a bit of this day.

(In memory of my father)

Driving down H Street, I see
a man at the curb, rake in hand,

and another man’s voice comes to me:
I can pray just fine raking the leaves,

though he really said this about mowing,
not being inclined toward leaf gathering

since our yard primarily consisted of old
live oaks that, when they did shed, did so

so unnoticeably that the leaves just lay
on the grass until they got churned up

by the lawn mower, morphing into mulch.
I love these there-you-are moments when

he appears, reminding me that all moments
are holy, no church needed, unless you want

to listen to someone tell a good story, and
close your eyes as a superb pianist fills

a whole room with the sound of eternity.

•••

(With thanks to Dr. Irina Tchantceva, pianist at
the Unitarian Universalist Society of Sacramento,
for her wonderful weekly performances.)

A pair of young, wiry men work over
my front yard for several days with
hands both strong and gentle,

lifting this earth that was once part
of their homeland—long before their
existence or mine as a native Californian—

for the 27 years when Alta California
was part of the new Mexican nation,
independent of Spain. It did not

take long for new conquerors to
decide that this vast land with its ripe
central valley, perfect for ranching

and crops, needed to be overtaken,
even before they knew about the gold
in these here hills. And they did—

people with pale skin like me—
as the Spanish did from the first
peoples who populated this place.

Many generations later I watch these
landscape artists, listen to their lilting
voices in Spanish as they work

for one more white lady, remaking
the small space I think of as mine
into a lovely swath of river rock

beds into which I will plant annuals
come spring. On a foggy Saturday
morning a trio spreads elephant gray

volcanic rock mixed with soft black
and iron-rich rust that once burbled
up through the earth in liquid form

before cooling into rough bits.
They install smooth slate called
Indian Paintbrush after the plant

as I think of the people who literally
paved the way for my existence,
the ancestors of this land,

along with my own young
parents who migrated west to
make a better life, to raise

California girls, we natives of
a different sort who owe our
comfortable lives to those who

sculpted this land. Like these
men who comprehend un poco
of my too-fast English, as I

struggle with their lyrical Spanish,
men whose wheelbarrows
clatter over chunks of ancient rock.

Who smile shyly when they summon
me to look at their finished work,
who acknowledge my muy bueno

and muchas gracias with a
gentlemanly tip of their ball caps
and a soft chorus of de nada.

•••

With thanks to the team of terrific professionals from JDL Land Management in Sacramento who remade my front yard into a thing of beauty. And to Lindsey Holloway and Chuck Dalldorf who highly recommended Gabriel Garcia and his team… as do I!
(Top photo: Dick Schmidt; photo below: Jan Haag)

Walking behind the young man paused
before the sliced meats in the grocery store,

I felt my feet skid to a stop at the sight of
the back of his head, the sandy blond hair

curling down to his collar, the style of many
a young man a half century ago when

such things began to matter to me—
almost feminine, above broad shoulders

and the narrow waist of one who
could be a swimmer, one whose hair

whispered to my fluttering fingers,
You know you want to.

I could not immediately place
the face of the one whose locks

my hands spent so much time fondling,
but my fingers knew the silk of that hair

as though they had explored it yesterday.
And the breath I did not realize

I had been holding left me
in a whoosh of remembrance,

more vibrant for its decades
of absence, leaving me

a little woozy, a feeling I have
happily not forgotten.

(Irish: happiness, joy)

•••

Sonas ort, the Irish say,
happiness on you,
my Irish friend tells me,

and in her lilt, I long for
the voice of my Irish
grandfather, who could

turn on a brogue in an instant.
Would he have known “sonas”?
Of course, he would,

from his mam and pap,
whom he came to call Mom
and Dad after they settled

in Chicago. And I feel my
ears pulling in a long-ago
direction to hear the music

of his voice that died more
than a half century ago,
too young at 64, younger

than I am now. Would that
he were around to explain,
as my young Irish friend does,

that sonas means not only
happiness, but also good
fortune and prosperity.

More important, I learn that
sonas requires a connection
to ancestors, their stories,

the ground they trod,
along with a longing for
that ancestral place.

I try to find calm,
the completeness,
the comfort

and happiness in all
that—even in the sudden
rush of missing him, the first

of four grandparents to die,
the one whose pipe smoke
arrives now and then with

the rustle of breeze through
leaves, the ones brittling now,
the ones soon to fall.

•••

With thanks to Jenny Cox of Clonmel, Ireland,
for telling me about “sonas” in my online writing group,
giving me a prompt that turned into this poem.

The first all-day rainy day calls for
donning the plum rain boots

as you head out for afternoon errands,
reminding yourself how to drive

on slick streets, to come to careful
and complete stops before proceeding.

Though you have things to do, you are
drawn to the edge of a parking lot

where the Chinese pistache trees
model the year’s most brilliant colors

while beginning to discard some of
what has clothed them since spring

in a mosaic of slick color at the curb.
Of course, you have to take a photograph

of this rich palette of loveliness—then
another and another. No wonder you

linger under these gently dripping trees
that punctually deliver this seasonal

fashion show before dropping everything
to stand proud and bare and tall

all winter long.

We are all hurling through space on a rock,
and we’re all going to die. You would think
we could be holding hands and singing.
—John Bradshaw

•••

Give me your hand. Here’s mine.
Whatever we think makes us different
is not as important as what makes
us human.

So human to human, let us not think
of division, of subtraction. Let us think
of multiplication, of adding my 1 to yours,
and to his and hers and theirs

as we stand on this sphere of rock
slowly rotating on an axis we can’t see,
in these brief lives between
the first breath and the last,
the first heartbeat and the last.

We are the bridge between
the ordinary and extraordinary.
Let us not curse the darkness
but instead light a candle
for each other and all beings
everywhere.

Who doesn’t need a blessing,
another hand reaching for ours?

And, while we’re at it—
one plus one plus one plus one
and on and on—let’s raise our voices
in song, add a little harmony to feel
the chord of many resonating
deep inside our chests.

May we hold hands and sing
as long and as loud as we can,
together, until the last breath.

Amen.