A Sampling of Orange County Poets’ Work

Here is a selection of poems from “The Webs We Weave.” For Laura Who Still Hears the Geese By Mitsuye Yamada I saw then in your face the same searching look the pinched face of that woman I met in Japan in another language Mouthing cliches too she said like hell on earth like a horrible nightmare like nothing you can imagine like everything you can imagine even then you will never know Hiroshima was a human junk heap . . . . The Great Peace March (for my father) By Kelli Bond Our play closed and I discovered the roots of my weeping at your hospital bed where you curled in semi-fetal position. Two nights before, Lawrence, Kansas became the Hiroshima of America on network TV The producers are morons, you said, for they were paid by the same sugar daddy who forced you on that C-47 that flying sardine can from Camp Pendleton, fall of ’58.... Zulu School Riot By John Brander There are only swallows in the playground this afternoon No one trudges up the road The caretaker is in his room with the door shut An absence of shadows The glow of winter has become a soft dust The air skims surfaces too warm to touch Acacia trees beyond the fencing loom in trance . . . Hours earlier a riot outside the police station left a score of children dead and dozens wounded . . .