Litany, Law & Love

Published 7 July 2022 as “Litany, Law & Love” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, © Wyndy J. Knox Carr. 

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and Ann Fisher-Wirth sent me their Look at This Blue: A Poem and The Bones of Winter Birds; and Burrell Speights gave me Two Neighborhoods in Harlem, including “Berkeley, California ’68; Haste Street and Telegraph Ave.” when I dropped a five-spot into his hat while he was playing flute on the BART Plaza. Wonderful “news!”

Hedge Coke’s book Blue links journeys in California’s ecological devastation, domestic abuse; military, legal and gun violence; species extinction, racism and Native genocide to her wish that “California, come home, / somewhere beyond brutal lies beauty.” A prodigious “assemblage” from Coffee House Press in Minneapolis.

“Mission blue butterfly, /from coastal chaparral, grasslands/… small, delicate gossamer-winged/…fringed in long, white hair-like scales/ undersides spotted/ wingspread 1-1.5 inches,” “in 1929, the State of California forcibly removed/ 400,000 Mexican American people/ from their state, their country of birth.” “Indian Act of 1850… legislature authorized arrests/ of any vagrant Natives to be hired out to highest bidder/ Native children to be indentured…”

List upon list of marvelous names and horrific decimations that yearn to be declared aloud in homage as well as shame, trumpeted toward action and change.

“Call for country, accountability, justice. /California, California.”

Burrell Speights twoneighborhoodsinharlem.com chronicles his discovery of “another style,” “Latin music” and dance (salsa) during the early 1960’s that led to his love of charanga handmade wooden flute and “this exciting music.”

He also describes “our house being across the street from the (People’s) park and right in the middle of the action” of “demonstrators…teargas, police, sheriffs and National Guard troops to get to class or the library,” where he narrowly escaped from “five or six Alameda County Sheriffs…running right at me…(who) had 2-feet long clubs gripped tightly in their hands…each, at least six feet tall and weighed no less than 250 pounds.” (!!!)

These truths must be told! (photo 1969 Dwight and Telegraph (c) by Harold Adler)

Ann Fisher-Wirth has an “extensive connection to Berkeley, 1957-68,” her “Mother lived” here “till 1996, and my oldest daughter still lives there.” The Bones of Winter Birds is an exquisitely crafted and carefully selected and constructed book of poetry.

In the first poem, “October: A Gigan” I was immediately captivated by her voice, the scene, her feeling conveyed of an “exhausted” summer where “we could find no joy,” and then “Balance     Gratitude     Breakthrough…/ Then it will come, the new” in the last lines.

Awe-inspiring art makes presence and presents of the past and future exist for us in the here and now. Fisher-Wirth does it again and again on every page. She knows of “Fukushima,” “nightmares,” “grief,” “I don’t know. Sometimes I just feel blah,” “grease-caked, coal-black stoves beside the limp lace curtains” and “the man who wants to kill me/ runs his hand along my thigh.”

But in the same breath, the same poems: “Tenderness,” “Your life melts around you/ like moonbeams,” “I love you just the way you are,” and teaching in prison,

“hours pass, laughter comes./ Halting or in a rush, words come./ They listen to each other, bear each other up…”

“You feel me?”

Yes. There is nothing to say about a good poem, a good story. Only embrace our own souls. Be in it. Let Love Move Us. From here to there…

“Out of the earth they come

and all things gather their separate radiance…” 

Ah!