Day 29, Poet 29: Claudia Castro Luna

Photo by Timothy Aguero

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.