We are thrilled to welcome the wonderful Native American poet Sharmagne Leland St.John as Featured Poet of the Village Poets Monthly Reading at Bolton Hall Museum on September 23, 2012 at 4:30 p.m. The event also includes an open mike for poets and refreshments served courtesy of Marlene Hitt and Mari Werner. A hat will be passed to collect funding for the hall's renovations. The Bolton Hall is located on Commerce Avenue in Tujunga California and it is hard to miss - the only building of river-stones among a sea of stucco.
Sharmagne Leland-St. John, 5 time Pushcart Prize nominee, is a
Native American poet, concert performer, lyricist, artist, and film maker. She
is the Editor-in-Chief of the poetry e-zine Quill and Parchment.com. Sharmagne
spends time between her home in the Hollywood Hills, in California and her fly
fishing lodge on the Stillaguamish River in the Pacific Northtwest. She is the founder of fogdog poetry in
Arlington, WA and tours the United States, Canada, and England, as a
performance poet.
She is widely anthologised and her poetry and short stories appear
as well in many on-line literary
journals. She has published 4 books of poetry Unsung Songs
(2003), Silver Tears and Time (2005), Contingencies
(2008), La Kalima (2010), and
co-authored a book on film production design. Designing Movies: Portrait of
a Hollywood Artist (Greenwood/Praeger 2006). Sharmagne
is co-editor of Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood (2012).
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EL NORTE
El
Norte.
A
prayer upon her brown lips.
El
Norte.
A
dream growing like
plumeria
blossoms from
empty
chambers in
her
heart.
In El
Norte
she
can make a decent wage.
Her
children will not go to bed hungry.
She
quits her job at the plantation,
kisses
her children’s warm cheeks
as
they sleep;
says
goodbye to Columbia.
The
Rio Grande behind her,
she
now mops my neighbours’ floors,
scrubs
their toilets
for
ten bucks an hour.
By
the time she pays rent for her room,
buys
bus tokens, and junk food
there
is little left to send home.
Her
children grow up without her.
Abuelita
sends black and white photographs.
The
little one is still frail and thin.
El
Norte
The
Land of Milk and Honey…
The
Promised Land he believes in.
He’ll
go on ahead,
send
for his children one by one;
then
his wife and the baby.
Under
the sweltering
San
Fernando Valley sun
he
pushes the market basket
as
he picks through
the
neighbourhood trash;
for
glass and aluminum
to
recycle for pennies.
Surely
his job teaching
the
village children their ABCs
was
better than this.
In
the marketplace in El Salvador
his
wife almost forgets she is married.
The
man with the gold tooth
smiles
at her as he wraps the fish
in
newspaper…
adding
an extra piece now and then.
She
misses her husband,
but
has nothing to confess to the priest
as
he leans in closer
to
hear her sins.
