Fire and Rain:
Ecopoetry of California
Edited by Lucille Lang Day
and Ruth Nolan
Foreword by Dana Gioia, Introduction by Jack Foley
In 2019, Fire and Rain received an Artists Embassy International Literary/Cultural Arts Award and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in Poetry.
Contributors: More than 250 poems by 149 contributors, including Ellen Bass, Christopher Buckley, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Camille T. Dungy, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Rebecca Foust, Dana Gioia, Rafael Jesús González, Emily Grosholz, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lynne Knight, Stephen Meadows, A. D. Miller, Gary Snyder, and David St. John.
From Fire and Rain:
ABUNDANCE
For John
The light differs here, half wild and whiter
than the tamer light that gilds the inland
cities gold. It ricochets
off silicates—mica flakes, sand grains,
quartz bits. Stasis can’t stay.
Even southward off Highway One
where flower herders grow mum,
larkspur, zinnia all the way
to the cliff-edge, the rocks
beyond shimmer, jut and glint;
the chicken-wire fences catch fire,
banter, undulate, wink. Nothing
holds still. Even your hair flies every
which way in the photo, the dazzle etched
against the sea. And you poise
in your winged stance, head thrown back,
arms wide, a festival receiving
of what can’t be caught.
To catch it, the Cliff House boasts a camera
obscura that shows the shore
through a pinhole. It rotates
first to Sanctuary Rock, lighthouseless,
then to the sea whose blues vary
by depth, meet and marry
like yin-yang’s mutually
fitting curves.
On Sanctuary Rock, the pelicans,
ladle-beaked, rubicund, fly and return.
The seals sun on. Cormorants preen. Everyone
does bird-call Kyrie eleisons,
the cacophony preying and mating
make. The pelicans in bands seem to dream
and lumber even in flight.
They look sideways at the seawall
with one tear-sodden, salt-reddened eye.
Then one dives. He seems to catch a fish glint,
an eye-spark, in this place that mints
new light each minute, its gift, the unstinting.
—Mary B. Moore