April is Poetry Month--a poem for each day we are open

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 9, 2009

Featuring
California Poet Laureate AL YOUNG –
Here tonight 7 PM Mendocino College Little Theater

UP JUMPED SPRING

What’s most fantastical almost always goes
unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring.
Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee
your night, creameries your dream factories.
Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest
means ofconveyance: a dance. Take leave
of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth
can still be the same earth our ancestors walked.
Chemistry strains to connect our hemispheres.
The right and left sidelines our brain forms
in the rain this new world braves – acid jazz.
The timeless taste her tongue leaves in your mouth,
stirred with unmeasured sugars, greens the day
the way sweet sunlight oxygenates, ignites
all nights, all daytimes, and you – this jumps.
Sheer voltage leaps, but nothing keeps or stays.
Sequence your afternoon as dance. Drink spring.
Holding her hard against you, picture the screenplay.
Take time to remember to get her spells together.
Up jumps the goddess gratified, and up jumped spring.


Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month

Love Poem With Toast
Miller Williams

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

April 12 -- Al Young, California Poet Laureate visits Mendocino County

National Poetry Month Poem of the Day for April 12, 2007

Celebrating the visits to Willits and Ukiah of California Poet Laureate Al Young

WILLITS LIBRARY 10 AM & UKIAH CITY HALL 7 PM with Ukiah Poets Laureate past & present

For Poets

Al Young

Stay beautiful

But don’t stay down underground too long

Don’t turn into a mole

or a worm

or a root

or a stone

Come on out into the sunlight

Breathe in trees

Knock out mountains

Commune with snakes

& be the very hero of birds

Don’t forget to poke your head up

& blink

Think

Walk all around

Swim upstream

Don’t forget to fly

Al Young

Notes on the Future of Love

Meanwhile over in yet another time zone,

somewhere between Iraq and another place

hard hit, the most toxic of gumbos thickens.

To the poisoned Kool-Aid taste of homemade sin,

answers-in-progress stack but don’t add up.

With every putrid breath you take, hope dissolves

into streaming reruns of hell and high water.

In Chinese, in Czech, in Arabic or Albanian,

in Japanese or German, does the Sermon on the Mount

still count? And does it say still: Thou shall not kill?

In your cozy time zone, sandwiched now somehow

between Iraq and another place hard hit,

where do you come down on the future of love?

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.