Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing - John Curl

 Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing by John Curl

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Curl got his Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing to me after Poetry Flash’s Watershed. If you are pondering whether to give a graduate or special friend a copy of Omar Khayyam’s The Prophet as a token of your pride, respect, love and esteem; you should give them Rainbow Weather instead. It’s that good, and just about as timeless, as well as more timely in the sense of contemporaneous currency.

The way he writes has Khayyam’s eternal quality, however, too. As one of the founders of Berkeley’s Indigenous Peoples Day who spent a year with the Navajo Nation in 1970 and since then working for Indigenous people’s rights, he says he’s a “Historian celebrating the accomplishments of native cultures and the works of ancient American poets.” 

He sounds like it, and has earned his chops as an activist in the craftspeoples’ collective movement of the East Bay and as a writer of poetry, “translator, fiction and non-fiction writer on social justice and historical perspectives,” too. Pronouncements. Incantations. Riddles in plain sight. Listen…
“our purpose in life is to ascend back to
that all-knowing state we originated from.” The Purpose of Mirrors

“America is suffering.
America is grieving from a broken heart.” What’s Wrong With This Country?

“The rider on the crest of the hill
contemplates the long road
watching both sun and rain in
the distance, searching the horizon.” Knight of Pentacles

If I had just one book to take into a high school or junior high school English class, this would be it.

“Sometimes the search for a livable
world can seem like dancing with
a lover who lets you just near
enough to almost touch her with
your outstretched fingers, then
dances away into the shadows
and mists just out of reach.

Yet what can we do but follow her
love song into those elusive mists over
and over again, until we make her ours.”

Book review published in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat, 23 February, 2023


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