American Life in Poetry: California Hills in August
Ted Kooser. Photo credit: UNL Publications and Photography. Let's hope that by the time this column appears all fires in California have been extinguished.
I wanted to offer you a poem that shows us what that beautiful but arid state can look like before it's caught fire.
The poet, Dana Gioia, served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and has been a friend to, and advocate for, poetry for many years.
This poem appeared in the anthology, “Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California,” from Scarlet Tanager Books.
California Hills in August
I can imagine someone who found these fields unbearable, who climbed the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, wishing a few more trees for shade.
An Easterner especially, who would scorn the meagerness of summer, the dry twisted shapes of black elm, scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape August has already drained of green.
One who would hurry over the clinging thistle, foxtail, golden poppy, knowing everything was just a weed, unable to conceive that these trees and sparse brown bushes were alive.
And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion, the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding, sunlit blue.
And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain— the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water.
Ted Kooser. Photo credit: UNL Publications and Photography. Let's hope that by the time this column appears all fires in California have been extinguished.
I wanted to offer you a poem that shows us what that beautiful but arid state can look like before it's caught fire.
The poet, Dana Gioia, served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and has been a friend to, and advocate for, poetry for many years.
This poem appeared in the anthology, “Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California,” from Scarlet Tanager Books.
California Hills in August
I can imagine someone who found these fields unbearable, who climbed the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, wishing a few more trees for shade.
An Easterner especially, who would scorn the meagerness of summer, the dry twisted shapes of black elm, scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape August has already drained of green.
One who would hurry over the clinging thistle, foxtail, golden poppy, knowing everything was just a weed, unable to conceive that these trees and sparse brown bushes were alive.
And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion, the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding, sunlit blue.
And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain— the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water.
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