Author Archives: Sally Ashton

(note from Poet Laureate: This poem was selected simultaneously by two different community leaders, appearing earlier as Sal Pizzaro’s favorite. However, each choice is both personally and uniquely different, and I decided to bookend these “notable” contributions rather than list them together. Here, our final installation from a local elected official, Christopher R. Moylan, with much appreciation to all who contributed their thoughts during the project kickoff. More news on the beginning of community postings to follow).

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

It sure is hard to pick one favorite poem.  It is very tempting to pick one of the great poems that seem to be about poetry itself, such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” by Williams, or “Anecdote of the Jar” by Stevens (particularly since Stevens had two careers, insurance executive and poet, just like many of us city councilmembers who have a day job and then a half-time government job).  I have always loved Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and it is a cautionary tale for those of us who are serving in government.

But given the times we live in, the one that most resonates with me as a local elected official, particularly one of Irish descent, is “The Second Coming” by Yeats.  Over and over these days, I find, like Yeats, that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  Unless those of us who have been selected for this duty can keep our heads, things will indeed fall apart and the center will not hold.

Christopher R. Moylan
Council Member, City of Sunnyvale

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

Claustrophilia
Alice Fulton

This is my second favorite poem at the moment. It would be my first favorite if I did not have such a strong lingering memory of the pack-punching final line in the other, temporarily-lost-on-my-desk favorite poem: “the operative word in all alone is all.”  Fulton’s poem is a wonderful collage of images and emotional cycles. It, too, is about the need for more than just one’s self. Her humor is perfect: romance dressed in leg irons, ground to a velvet. She captures a female mindset of deep yet glib self-observation.

Susan Krane
Oshman Executive Director
San Jose Museum of Art

Claustrophilia

It’s just me throwing myself at you,
romance as usual, us times us,

not lust but moxibustion,
a substance burning close

to the body as possible
without risk of immolation.

Nearness without contact
causes numbness. Analgesia.

Pins and needles. As the snugness
of the surgeon’s glove causes hand fatigue.

At least this procedure
requires no swag or goody bags,

stuff bestowed upon the stars
at their luxe functions.

There’s no dress code,
though leg irons

are always appropriate.
And if anyone says what the hell

are you wearing in Esperanto—
Kion diable vi portas?—

tell them anguish
is the universal language.

Stars turn to train wrecks
and my heart goes out,

admirers gush. Ground to a velvet!
But never mind the downside,

mon semblable, mon crush.
Love is just the retaliation of light.

It is so profligate, you know,
so rich with rush.

Alice Fulton
 The New Yorker,
August 2, 2010

Among School Children
William Butler Yeats

I love the richness of Yeats’s fine mind listening to itself, the interiority, the intertwining of memory and learning reaching towards understanding. Between first and second verse, my favorite stanza break. As he stands smiling before the children, a longing for his lost love breaks over him. Heart feels the gulf between public image and private self. At last, magnificent stanza eight – answer that is riddle.

I taught this poem for many years. One day I looked around the classroom and realized I was a “sixty year old smiling man.” Now, I’ve outlived Yeats, that great poet of old age.

Nils Peterson
Professor Emeritus, San José State University
Poet Laureate Emeritus, Santa Clara County

Saadi, 13th century Persian poet

I believe this poem very eloquently states the common roots and linkages that all of us have as part of the human race. The analogy of the human body to the human race sagaciously demonstrates that if one person is suffering, it is the suffering of all humankind. By this assertion our insouciance to other humans’ pain anywhere questions our worthiness to be considered as part of the human community. Thus, our common elements as part of the human race clearly eclipse any differences that we may perceive by any set of measures or metrics.

The English translation of the poem is posted in the halls of the United Nations.

Mohammad H. Qayoumi, President
California State University, East Bay
Incoming President, San José State University

Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul,

If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.

Saadi

What We Want
Linda Pastan

I love this poem because it captures the mystery and the ache of the yearning for that which has no name and cannot be found in the outer world, not even in the face of a loved one. Though we search the outer world, the thing we long for responds to us in our innermost world, our dreams, as we “fall past” it, but awaken with aching arms.  It is hidden yet right before our eyes “as the stars are there even in full sun.” I especially love that the poet does not try to “teach” us or  name what it is that we seek, but instead leaves the mystery there before us.

Parthenia M. Hicks
Los Gatos Poet Laureate

What We Want

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.