From  Poems for Endangered Places by the San Luis Obispo County Plein Air Poets (Central Coast Press, 2008)

 

Environmental Impact Report

 

In a strange afternoon stillness

Belying the traffic stream nearby

A snowy egret sleek in flight

Evades containment

Soars

Over tall chain link fence

Topped with barbed wire that separates

The soft hem of shamrock green hills

From stucco box stores bordered

By parking lot upon rolling parking lot

 

In a strange afternoon stillness

Chaparral   oaks   and eucalyptus

Sit   sway   and murmur   on the slopes

Like women at a sale table in a store below

With brows rumpled by deliberation

 

In stillness the hills speak:

You are the stuff of your choices

  You eat them

    Wear them

      Drive them

        Live them

          Are empowered or defeated by them

 

With the chisel and hammer of our choices

We re-sculpt our world 

 

Jane Elsdon

 

 

Old Avila

 

IÕm looking for empty spaces

Unoccupied by people or their houses

The places that used to lie across the street

Overgrown with golden mustard, wild radish

And mugwort.  Into that emptiness we carried

Weeds, tree limbs, the brittle Christmas trees,

Rotted porch steps, bulbs thinned from the garden.

 

Weeds mulched, branches dried, boards rotted

In the tall June grass, tinder for new firefighters

In oversized boots and stiff yellow jackets

To practice their skills to the captainÕs shouts,

Shrill as he signaled recruits to leap from red engines

Where flames burst them to action, and they stumbled

For hoses, turned debris into cinders.

 

Callas, narcissus and iris pushed their way

Through ashes in that empty lot

Now covered in condos and pavement

Once aflame in wild mustard.

 

Sylvia Alcon

 

 

Mountain Mornings

 

Fog still asleep in the valleys

I climb a loop trail

Named for the man-of-the-fells

Who helped save this mouintain

For all of us

 

If IÕm early enough

Fog drips from the oaks

And fellow beings appear

 

A doe with two fawns

A pair of foxes

Sluggish ants carrying grass seeds

Morning glories half-awake

And always pearly everlasting

 

I pass through a cattle gate

And ascend a ridge into an earthen heaven

Atop clouds that mute the highway

The prison

Everything below

 

Rather than eternity

On golden streets I choose

A dirt path

Daily to my bliss

 

Rosemary Wilvert