Four Poems by Kim Stafford

Winds of Change

High over the fire line, embers fly
in a flock seeking tinder farther on,
a dry grass nest, a place to breed
and cry, to flare wide wings that
shade all color into black.

Or fire on a rampage becomes
the bad boy, bully on the prowl
who got no respect, vandal tagging
everything in sight, intent on mayhem
like there’s no tomorrow.

Remind you of anyone?

*

Prepare for the Political Quake

They say snakes and centipedes
flee their burrows before a big one.
That long belly, and many feet, can
feel it. They say birds leap from their
nests, and dogs begin to howl to warn us.
They say when destruction swaggers in,
when streets ripple and walls fall, you either
hold on tight, or dance like crazy. Then fishes
will be fine, but the paper palace of the wasps
will shake and shatter. They say before it hits
when times are good, all good people can go
with the flow, take it easy, be kind by habit—
but when chaos begins, every rational act
will be precious. They say be ready to howl,
then to help, when the big one comes.

*

Blame the Victims

So far, no one says it out loud because
it’s crazy logic, but don’t you sense
some people believe if you’re suffering
it must be your fault? Homeless? You
got yourself there. Hurricane hit you,
took your house again? You’re living
in the wrong place. Running from fire?
Maybe you got too happy, too secure.
Poor? Hey, it’s a free country, and you
used your freedom to fail, to stumble
and fall, to crash and burn. You think
the system’s rigged against you? Think
it’s tyranny at the top—fat cats calling
the shots at you and yours? Friend, you
brought this on yourself. Just ask X.

*

Medieval People

Now we see them everywhere, staggering
in their scavenged rags at the foot of gleaming
towers, or huddled, tented under the freeway.
Theirs is an ancient suffering, brutal, primal:
hunger, cold, dawn made lonely by shunning.
All around them, the renaissance brims with
abundance, invention, comfort, while they
live in their own time zone, a little ice age,
on foot where mastodons on wheels are apex.
Are they the ones who scrawled enigmas on
our walls, left heaps of sorry treasure, spoke
a dialect we never learned, kept a flame alive
into darkness before they disappeared?

*

Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He taught writing at Lewis & Clark College for forty years before retiring and becoming Professor Emeritus in 2020. He is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. He has written about his poet father in Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, and his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place won a special citation for excellence from the Western States Book Award. His most recent poetry collections are As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024) and A Proclamation for Peace Translated for the World (Little Infinities, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term. In a call to writers everywhere, he has said, “In our time is a great thing not yet done. It is the marriage of Woody Guthrie’s gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of songs, poems, blessings, manifestos, and stories by those with voice for those with need.”