POULSBO — Poets Ralph Cheadle, Mike Dillon and Richard Walker will read their works beginning at 7 p.m. Jan. 7 at the monthly Poulsbohemian Poetry Reading.
The Poulsbohemian Coffeehouse is located at 19003 Front St. NE, Poulsbo. The featured poets will be followed by an open mike.
Cheadle moved in 1969 to Bainbridge Island, where he taught 29 years at Bainbridge High School and raised three children (now grown). He was close friends with Bob McAllister, Everett Thompson, and Nancy Rekow, and because of that was in the weekly writing workshops begun by McAllister (which have now continued for more than 40 years). Cheadle and McAllister were influenced by Nelson Bentley. Cheadle is now enjoying retirement.
Dillon grew up on Bainbridge Island and has lived in Indianola for three decades. He retired as publisher of Pacific Publishing Co. in Seattle in 2013. He will read from a new, Indianola-centric book of haiku, “Outside the Garden” (Red Moon Press). Along the way, he’ll explore some of the misconceptions that have gathered around the small art form and the state of English-language haiku today. As Robert Spiess, the late editor of Modern Haiku wrote, “Genuine haiku embody the existential mystery of things.”
Several of Dillon’s haiku appeared in “Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years” (W.W. Norton, 2013).
Dillon will also read a handful of poems from previous books of his regular poetry, as well as new work, including a manuscript in progress.
Walker is editor of Kitsap News Group and author of three books. He is of Mexican/Yaqui ancestry. His poetry has been published in Indian Country Today; Yellow Medicine Review/ A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought (Southwest Minnesota State University); and in a chapbook, “The Journey Home” (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2012). He and his wife Molly, a member of the Samish Indian Nation, live in Poulsbo. They enjoy cultural activities and events, spending time with family, and exploring Coast Salish country.
RALPH CHEADLE
Day after our wedding
we walked in Woodland Park.
The rustle of the peacock’s
fan was as startling as
the shuffle of a diamond
fingered gambler.
Behind iridescent eyes
on his feathers a dusky hen
faded in the hollow of a bush.
We talked through the menagerie
of other marriages grinning
like losers entranced
by the clack of dice
in some floating game.
From the shade of a hawthorn
your eyes gently mocked
the preening of a graying dandy.
MIKE DILLON
Song of the Hermit
I hied myself to the forest
and declared a truce with the soul’s civil wars.
I peeled off the ancient curse of not belonging — that upholstered noose.
Where your trail ends mine begins.
Old Couple
Says she: “There’ll be a full moon tonight,”
who carries her life in a dirty canvas sack.
Walking beside her, so does he.
“Almost full,” he corrects, softly as moss.
They part the sea of pigeons in the square
as blue May hums over the city
and its towers of steel and glass
where their braided being drifts like spring rain.
Or two deer sloped to a moonlit lake.
Home
Gone too many autumns
from my home ground
I had almost forgotten
how thoughts of autumn
become drifts of golden leaves,
the blackened fruit of spawning salmon.
I had almost forgotten
the calligraphy of the estuary man
against a dark cloud bank, raking for crabs.
Or the longer shadow cast
by a leaning gate post,
the monastic silence of its moss.
I had not quite forgotten
the village faces, angelic and precise now,
as they go upon their rounds.
Or the baritone foghorn at midnight
with Orion strung in a sky hole
above the western firs, even so.
Cliffs
Even now, in your midnight dreams
you try your wings and fly.
Morning: You wake to walk
earth’s steep gravity
where each breath you take
thrusts a new cliff at your feet
that whispers: Remember,
despair has no wings.
She Senses Her Future Life
The child left alone
in an oak-paneled room
of a great house
filling with adult laughter
in a farther room
gazes at the wall
of old books bound in leather
and the mustiness
of another century,
takes one down
and begins to read
and drifts far from the distant laughter
until the last robin’s carol
brings her to the window
where the evening star blooms
above the dark wood.
RICHARD WALKER
Jack
“Jack’s at the fire
again,”
someone says
in a way that implies,
“Jack’s avoiding us,” or
“Jack’s being antisocial,”
but he’s not being
antisocial at all,
but listening to the
crackle of the fire
in a longhouse,
listening to the drums
and songs,
watching shadows
on the fence and
imagining the dancers’
shadows on the
longhouse walls,
the shadows and songs
of his ancestors and his
relatives.
Here at the fire, he’s
not a boy with a Scandinavian name
from East Wenatchee,
but he’s who he really is,
a man who carries the
blood of the Penticton,
of the Okanagan, of the Osoyoos
and the Similkameen,
an urban man who longs
for the river, longs for
the smell of cedar and
forest and salmon.
I join him as he
tends the fire
and he looks up
as if to say,
“Hello, uncle,”
but the words come out,
“way’, sesi?.”
The Payment
To all those conquistadors
who came here and tried
to replace our culture
with their own:
This is what the world
shall know about you.
You were nothing but unwelcome
visitors here,
you took our people’s welcome,
the welcome of our leaders,
and answered with
land lust and flesh lust
and murder.
Here’s what we have done:
We have kept your names
and language as partial payment
for the destruction you left
behind,
for lives lost,
for rape and enslavement,
for your gold lust.
Let no one say
we are Hispanic or Latino.
We are Indigenous People.
You did not change who
we are.
The names we carry and
the common language we speak,
once possessed by you alone,
belong to the Indigenous now,
reminders to the world
that you are gone, but
we are still here.
Let no one say these
are Spanish names —
they are Mexican names;
or that the language we speak
is the Spanish language —
it is a Mexican language now.
Yes, when people hear our names
and when people hear us speak,
they will say,
“Ah, there is one who carries
the blood,
A child of The Survivors.”
Our People live on.
