Sometimes, on sojourns abroad, poets open to visions of their homelands.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), living in Italy, wrote “The Mask of Anarchy” (1819), a poem about oppression and social upheaval in his native England, specifically the city of Manchester. While in Italy Englishman Robert Browning (1812–1889) wrote his poem “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” (1845), a poem extolling English rural landscapes.
Browning’s poem celebrates the arrival of spring, with trees blossoming and birds singing. Shelley’s poem decries state violence against demonstrators demanding their rights, in this case, universal male suffrage. Both poems keep the abroad and the at home separate.
Each frames its new consciousness of England as an awakening, Browning’s to natural cyclical changes in the rural, Shelley’s to radical human changes in the urban.
But what about change at the urban-rural interface, cyclical yet radical, with entanglements of human and more-than-human agency at various scales, yielding a poem mixing the abroad and the at home?
Far from East Pasadena, in the village of Fotinos on the Greek isle of Crete, Victoria Thomas wrote her poem “AFTERBURN.”
AFTERBURN
The two mothers lock eyes,
one pair human, one pair yellow.
Pups croon in the shadow cool
where coyote dug her den beneath my neighbor’s shed,
the backyard half-readied for the quinceañera,
a mocked trap leaning with rust, spring-loaded, wide open, empty.
Resting across a rainbird lawn,
coyote crosses her slender paws as demurely as a dog’s.
Full midsummer will bring another song from her alpha,
another joinery under a broken-glass night,
night of Aquila, Cygnus, Lyra, Scorpius.
Humans bobble there too,
drawn to the CVS parking lot by the magnet of a neon moon
to drop jellied condoms from car windows
that bubble tomorrow on the morning pavement.
We awaken to the taste of ashes.
Turning from 34.15º N, -118.13 º W to 35.24º N, 24.80º E,
Ephesus and Crete, Rhodes and Santorini,
prickly-pear pads and milk-thistles bristle the dull hillsides.
Colors known to our valley,
jacaranda-pomegranate-oleander-aloe-geranium,
the shrimp-blush bougainvillea,
hum against limestone and whitewash
in that gutting slant of near-summer light.
The terraces are ruined,
the fortresses impotent.
But here, we pay as pilgrims to sigh over broken stones,
dreaming our own feet constellating the dance floor of a noble family.
The stars are always burning.
The waterfall doesn’t weep for us.
We dare not trust our own hearth and fireplace,
fearing sparks and embers,
flammability,
ignition,
contamination,
loss of context,
erased identity,
starting over.
The Eaton rubble was filled with vessels,
lime-encrusted like something Etruscan from the bottom of the sea, or the landfill of destiny.
But who here will remember to raise a glass to the Minik Market,
and its oya-border of fringed scarlet carnations?
Who will write and send the souvenir postcard of Café Leche,
with its acid-bubblegum wall?
Who will howl the corrido of bienfrias at El Rancho, of Lake Avenue lost?
The air is filled with swords.
Mother coyote, foothills seraph,
picks her sundown way over Queensberry to Brigden,
lightly leaps a dry-bone ridge to read the deepening air for smoke, gossip.
We secure our weapons,
We hide our gems and jewels,
We count out our pills,
and await the next inevitable.
— Victoria Thomas
Victoria Thomas spent her childhood in the South Bronx, skipping school to take the bus to The Cloisters where the unicorn tapestries telepathically spoke to her in medieval French. As a student in Colorado, she studied with Allen Ginsberg at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, and these days writes mostly tanka and haiku.
Local News Pasadena (LNP) publishes poems grounded in current news events from the greater Pasadena, California area. Submit your own poetry here.
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