Growing up in remote Kapoho, I, too, found solace in poets long gone.
Dead Poets Alive
The dead kept me alive
Confined to a village so isolated,
So unpaved, so un-vehicled,
So battery-run. Our three-party line
A public service gossip center.
The speechless dead took me beyond
Montgomery Ward catalogs, dream-makers
Until one day I discover an oracle
Within the pages, poets long gone.
Promises of wondrous worlds
For the me not yet formed.
Oh, how I mourn that “breath of ecstasy”
To travel that road where dreams can go
Though not so much “in depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach.”
And like a little “nobody” to “lie down
To pleasant dreams.”
It was the dead who gave me such dreams
And showed the woman I’d become
To wander where they could not go
And wonder at what got them there.
My morning still lay ahead, I still “had miles to go.”
And oh, how “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”
from Dangerous Woman: Poetry for the Ageless
Frank Graham of Sacramento Poetry Center will be interviewing me on:
