Each month, the San Francisco Public Library Web site, www.sfpl.org, will feature selected poems reflecting the theme of War and Peace on Our Streets.
To submit a poem or for more information about the project, see our News Release.
September Featured Poet: Susan Sibbet
Susan Herron Sibbet has worked with California Poets in the Schools for twenty years in San Francisco, where she and her husband live in a flat next to Argonne Community Garden, along with their children,
dogs, cats, and various small reptiles. She has been a Bunting Fellow, an Affiliate Artist with the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a founding member of Sixteen Rivers Press, a Bay Area poetry
collective. Her books of poems include Burnt Toast and Other Recipes.
Susan say’s here is:
My list of books--these are ones I'm reading now, going back to, over and over, using to inspire me, or just what I love:
- Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: a Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, a new English version by Ursula Le Guin, from Shambala, 1997 (ISBN 1-57062-333-3)
- Li-Young Lee: Book of my Nights: Poems, from BOA Editions, 2001, (ISBN 1-929918-07-0)
- Carolyn Miller: After Cocteau from Sixteen Rivers Press, 2001 (ISBN 0-9707370-3-3)
- Xuan Huong Ho: Spring Essence, edited and translated by John Balaban, Copper Canyon Press, 2000, (ISBN 1-55659-148-9)
Here
by Susan Sibbet
what we know, perhaps what matters,
is wild orange and bright acacia in spring,
small folded bloom, the secret flower
of sweet gum in summer,
and the slow winter rains.
In this still, warm air,
the heavy days like spoons of jam,
my tongue will never get used to the tickling.
Today, I knew an earthquake would come to shake me
before it began. On the phone
with my friend across the city,
talking of our children, she asked me if I felt it,
before it began to shake this house.
Here they built on sand, using what was left
of the old redwoods for the crossbeams.
The smaller trees that my great-grandfather
in Ukiah passed by, we use to build decks
on the backs of houses, to get the view
of the yard behind.
Here there is no groundwater, no easy light,
our own roots are the enemy, stealing from
each other. Counting the spoons,
we are waiting, each of us, and getting older.
We count everything now.
