In the Cities of Sleep: Elizabeth C. Herron

In the Cities of Sleep by Elizabeth Herron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
 

Art House Gallery on Shattuck Avenue near Ashby hosted another Poetry Flash reading where Elizabeth C. Herron read from In the Cities of Sleep, a moving interplay between her individual perception and love of beings, nature and the world in light of the crushing disparities of climate change, political and social injustice, the humbling infinitude of Creation/ the Cosmos.

I wrote the words “private,” “insignificant” and “infinitely beautiful” in my notebook, not knowing whether they were from one of her poems, my impression of her, or something she said.

The Sonoma County Poet Laureate, she juxtaposed Greta Thunberg’s quote about our “house on fire” in the epigraph with the nursery rhyme “Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home.” 

The silhouette of a leafless tree before a terrifying orange-red blur on the cover takes on new meaning.

In “Ghost Dance” there are similar paradoxes of

Quiet spaces in the mind
wide as the Great Plains…
In Nebraska and Kansas,
the harvester pitches over acres
pocked for thousands of years
by burrows and warrens that caught the rain
for the Ogallala aquifer…
grinding over the quiet spaces in the mind
of the First Nations…
How will we live
without the quiet
spaces in the mind?

In “Nesting,” reproductive avian behavior balances precariously with
“The mother in her kitchen
unable to avert” the arc of a stray bullet from
“her eleven-year-old daughter;”

with “The mallards… wander
within the slain grass, dazed
by the absence of their nest, the disappearance
of their eggs.”

In her Art House Gallery reading of “Ceremony” I noted: “A threat to all species… a long period of denial…” and “the shift from known identity to no identity to” a place where “new emerge.”

Again, the “Liminal State” where great genius, great wounds and complete transformational leaps are possible. Don’t miss her long poems, and the lovely lines like

“Across the small chaos
of our bed, the cat stretches
one paw toward you, closes his eyes,
and sleeps.”

(Published in “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.)
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