Seattle’s Poem Seattle is a house perched on the comings and goings of water and wind ripple of fish feather of crow early morning ferry yawn Seattle I say and invoke a man and a place the two inseparable not proportional not parallel but as language is to poem and salt to sea I watch bridges, bicyclists, boats summer blankets tendered on public lawns I watch fiery sunsets tango and sway above jagged peaks and autumn trees bursting gold up and down hilly streets Nevertheless before I postcard and gloss and more sunsets and more trees find their way into my lines I must confess the house’s foundation is in places brittle and many rooms are dark for windows lack Plenty have I been on the receiving end of rehearsed indifference heard enough shallow arguments on who belongs here to wake up scooping ocean water with a spoon we are all here that need to be The city is concrete and steel plus the sum of its people every day we destroy our house then race to remake it those narrow windows block future’s view mute voices that need to be heard muffle the sound of the falling tree limb heavy with ripe plums Every day we tread over Chief Sealth’s legacy his prophetic words, “At night, when the streets … will be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.” We are not alone save for his people we are all immigrants here waiter, teacher, artist, worker, nurse we belong all of us belong Seattle is a house we all need to afford Previously published on Claudia Castro Luna's blog and later turned into a video by The Seattle Times. Claudia Castro Luna is Poet Laureate for Washington State (2018-2020) She served as Seattle’s first Civic Poet from 2015-2017 and is the author of Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) and This City (Floating Bridge Press). Claudia is a Hedgebrook and VONA alumna, a Jack Straw fellow (2014), and recipient of grants from King County 4Culture and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. She lives in English and Spanish and writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children. Comments are closed.
|
Blog HostNatasha Kochicheril Moni is a writer and a licensed naturopath in WA State. Enjoying this blog? Feel free to put a little coffee in Natasha's cup, right here. Archives
October 2019
Categories |