Advertisement
William O’Daly has translated nine books of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda’s poetry, most recently Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight . He has published four chapbooks of poems and in September 2022 his first full-length volume, The New Gods, with Beltway Editions. In March 2023, the Los Angeles Master Chorale included three poems from The New Gods and one from the chapbook Waterways in the world premiere of Reena Esmail’s “Malhaar: A Requiem for Water,” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In
September 2021, he received the American Literary Award from the bilingual Korean American journal Miju Poetry and Poetics. O’Daly is the Lead Writer for the California Water Plan.
Origin
Long ago you and I struggled to be born
among the standing stones,
underground fire, mineral rain,
furrows of imagination yellowed by the sun.
Our immobile blood burned blue
even as the wind shaped
our serene incarnation. We deciphered
the doors of the earth, found the one to open
on who we would become.
Our still-closed eyes strived to name oneness,
to behold the mystery of our bodies
falling in a rage of flame, in the rhythms
and textures of our appetites. We tuned ourselves
to sow and reap, shepherd and slaughter,
to be true to many selves
and the singularity
from which we came.
Forging weapons that turn night to day
we meditated on the clouds
littered with the psalms of migrating birds.
We mourned the wild horses,
the range stripped of native forage.
The prayer wheel spun us at our core
as we labored to learn that how
we live is what we leave behind.
Returning to the solace of not seeking,
we need no face or syllable or seed,
as we come to know in our hearts
what we cannot know any other way.
* * *
Richard Robbins was raised in California and Montana, taught in Minnesota for many years, and recently moved back west to Oregon. He studied poetry writing with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees at the University of Montana, where he earned his MFA. He has received awards or residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, Willapa Bay artist retreat, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. Lynx House Press recently published his seventh book of poems, The Oratory of All Souls, in February 2023.
Memory of Water / Constellation
—
a painting by Brian Frink, 2014
The death of a star trails its light
all these billions of years
only to find a human drawing lines
pulse-to-pulse to build beast or archer.
We would make a story to see through the night.
Each stringed thing would wait for
extinction to find it, to undress
mythology and belief. In no time, not a thing
would remain but Leviathan
commanding the great curved deep, and above it
the face of the waters
and across that the first breath moving again.
Advertisement
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1169 Perkins Way, Sacramento, CA 95818-3726, United States