April is POETRY month

Donna Kerr, Branch Head of the Willits Library and Eliza Wingate, Reference Librarian at Ukiah choose a poem for each day the Libraries are open during the month of April.

Poetry

April 3, 2007

Eliza's choice

Betty

She loved cut class
Fine china, lace doilies
Everything protected;
Table by a felt pad,
Chair seat by towel or throw
Where Spiky knew his place
If there was no lap

Demure steel grey car
Only 65K miles in sixteen years
Pristine except for hub-caps

Furniture minimal
Wardrobe understated
Lipsticks muted
Possessions rigorously thinned out
Anticipating death

But oh! The dangly earrings
And ah! The bank accounts
Left in aid of animals
In distress

Sandra Wade
Current Poet Laureate of Lake County



Donna's choice

PINK MOON - THE POND

You think it will never happen again.

Then, one night in April,

the tribes wake trilling.

You walk down to the shore.

Your coming stills them,

but little by little the silence lifts

until song is everywhere

and your soul rises from your bones

and strides out over the water.

It is a crazy thing to do -

for no one can live like that,

floating around in the darkness

over the gauzy water.

Left on the shore your bones

keep shouting come back!

But your soul won't listen;

in the distance it is unfolding

like a pair of wings, it is sparking

like hot wires. So,

like a good friend,

you decide to follow.

You step off the shore

and plummet to your knees -

you slog forward to your thighs

and sink to your cheekbones -

and now you are caught

by the cold chains of the water -

you are vanishing while around you

the frogs continue to sing, driving

their music upward through your own throat,

not even noticing

you are something else.

And that's when it happens -

you see everything

through their eyes,

their joy, their necessity;

you wear their webbed fingers;

your throat swells.

And that's when you know

you will live whether you will or not,

one way or another,

because everything is everything else,

one long muscle.

It's no more mysterious than that.

So you relax, you don't fight it anymore,

the darkness coming down

called water,

called spring,

called the green leaf, called

a woman's body

as it turns into mud and leaves,

as it beats in its cage of water,

as it turns like a lonely spindle

in the moonlight, as it says

yes.

Mary Oliver

California Poet Laureate to visit Ukiah & Willits Libraries

Al Young, California's Poet Laureate
will appear Thursday, April 12th

Willits Library 10 to 11:30 a.m.
for a reading and a Q & A session.
300 Commercial St. 459-5908

Ukiah Council Chambers at 7:00 p.m.
Reading/Performance with Al Young,
bassist Don Robbins &
present & past Ukiah Poet Laureates,
David Smith-Ferri,
Linda Noel & Armand Brint.
300 Seminary Rd. Off of S. State St.

PoETry, POETRY, poEtRy, poetry

Poetry to Go Poesia Para Llevar is a new poetry contest hosted as part of its Mendocino LitFest program. Open to entries until March 15th. Poems on any topic may be submitted in either Spanish/English or both. For further information contact Bill Churchill at jabezw@sonic.net or visit the Lit Fest site at http://www.mendolitfest.org The top twelve entries will be exhibited on Mendocino Transit buses.

Two Poetry Festivals
Entries due soon!!

ukiaHaiku Festival can be found at http://www.ukiaHaiku.org
for categories. Entries must be postmarked by Saturday, March 17.
Winning Haiku will be read Sunday afternoon, April 29th 2007