About Beth Coyote
Beth Coyote is a midwife, gardener, grandmother, painter and community activist who helped edit the Poets Against the War website and Voices in Wartime education project. She has stood with Women in Black in the Westlake Mall, organizes Change Your Mind Day, an annual poetry reading for local Buddhist groups; laminates poems to display on trees; and, with the Garlic Gulch Poets, helped form a monthly writing series in Columbia City. Her publications include the Washington Poets Association anthologies, synapse, Chrysanthemum, When It Rains, From the Ground Up and From the Web, a women's anthology of antiwar writings.
Nominated by It's About Time Reading Series
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The It's About Time Writers Reading Series exists for all those who want to write. It is dedicated to the memory of Anna Helfgott, (1899-1996) who began writing at age 70, & to the memory of Nelson Bentley (1918-1990), the quintessential teacher who gave Anna, and scores of others, help and hope. It's About Time is dedicated to an end of racism, homophobia, antisemitism, homelessness and war.
SYRACUSE 1961
by Beth Coyote
you had forgotten crickets fireflies
groundhogs at the edge of plowed rows
sight down your father's finger
deer flounce their white tails along the two lane
but today on the steps of the garage
a grasshopper
you swear you hadn't seen one
since you left upstate
you walked slow in the heat
grasshoppers pinged off the tall grass
of your childhood fields
tobacco spit on your palm
snap! wing blades arced over the blurred acre
there were so many you never thought
you would miss them
or that the world would rush up
at you like today like now
you wonder where am I
why are there no golden rod or blue jays
where is the willow in the front yard
where are my parents
where is the garden hoe that will kill your father
he just wanted to lie down
after weeding the tomatoes
where is your mother who will find him
on the living room floor
too late to save
where are cattails orioles the black snake
your brother kept in a box