by devorah major

From the introduction

It was one of those San Francisco postcard days; the sky was a tasty azure blue and the air warm and comfortable. I knew that if I drove north I would see the bay splayed in shimmering splendor, dotted with sailboats and a few lumbering tankers. Yes, if I drove north there would be gulls swooping down as I passed well- appointed Victorian manors. As my car pulled up and over San Francisco’s famous steep hills I would be reminded of the lost hearts and found oases that San Francisco means to so many. But I drove south instead. My first view was of three children chasing each other down the street laughing before quieting as they neared a newly constructed memorial assembled for a young man who was a recent casualty of the street wars of San Francisco. The display was touching in the love, compassion, and tender caring that the young people had shown to their fallen friend, partner, lover, homeboy, relative. It was replete with both modest and expensive bouquets of flowers, helium–filled balloons, notes proclaiming love and remembrance, a neatly ordered color spectrum of miniature and half–pint liquor bottles — blue Bombay Gin, amber Wild Turkey whiskey, brown Courvoisier — and a photo of the very young man that revealed his dark brooding eyes and wide lush lips. On the opposite comer I saw the remains of a previously constructed curbside memorial. The few remaining flowers were wilted, deflated balloons scraped the walk, and the libation vials were already gone, probably picked up by one of the neighborhood’s homeless shopping-cart workers who rush to collect bottles and cans, clothes, and other tradable treasures before the recycling trucks arrive to swallow their livelihoods.

I was on my way to my sister–friend’s house in Bayview on the southeast side of the city. She and I have known each other since high school. We have seen San Francisco bend and sway, curdle and explode as our neighborhoods’ populations changed and moved, as the poor and Black, and Latino populations got squeezed up and over and out of this tourist and arts mecca. The two of us laughed the afternoon away, drinking tea and standing on her back porch looking at the new plants her husband had planted in the backyard. There were birds of paradise, exotic cacti, oregano, and rosemary. We smiled, sighed, and frowned fears and dreams for our children, especially for our endangered sons, and then I left. I got in my car and drove a half a block, only to see another memorial for a dead youth, and then turning the corner drove another block and saw yet another memorial. Within the next two blocks were strands and ribbons of a fifth memorial, this one almost completely disintegrated so that the lost one was now little more than a mortality statistic to those who did not know him or her well.

I was quite shaken up: one afternoon, five memorials. How many could I see in a full day, or in a week if I drove the streets of San Francisco? Why was this other San Francisco never a part of the public picture? Weren’t these “San Francisco” images reflected in cities across the nation and around the globe? Why were these youth, the ones who mourned so openly, so thoughtfully, usually ignored? Why were those youth, the ones who died so openly, so violently, mostly forgotten? How many memorials are constructed and then decay to dust in the declared and undeclared wars of our times? How could I, a simple poet, shine the light on them, let their lives and concerns be seriously engaged?

It was during this period that I was beginning to shape my project as Poet Laureate of San Francisco. As a part of the laureate selection process the six finalists were asked to propose a project that we would complete if given the position. With years of nonprofit grant writing and completed artist residency applications under my belt I submitted a statement that was as concrete as it was nebulous. It spoke of involving youth and adults, experienced wordsmiths and novice writers, and loads of collaboration that would enable San Franciscans to communicate the truths of their lives through poetry. My drive through San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, magical San Francisco, difficult and tragic San Francisco, gave structure to my project, which I named City Reflections: War and Peace on Our Streets. I wanted to show a vision of the city that was larger than the travelogues that we all have come to know, more real than the “Streets of San Francisco” police dramas that fill television screens, more personal than a panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge or a close–up photograph of the Japantown Peace Pagoda. I wanted to find a way to make the city a springboard to the larger nation and world, to draw parallels and find contrasts. I put a call out asking professional poets, as well as people who did not see themselves as poets but who still took the time to scribe a poem or two to submit poems on the subject. I encouraged children and teens to write about their neighborhood, their streets, their perceptions and experiences of peace and/or war on our streets. And the poems came. Some, like A.D. Winans, embrace the multifaceted city:

I’ve walked these San Francisco streets
Like a crime photographer walks his beat
My eyes taking in her every movement
My brain storing real and imagined images …

Impassioned, celebratory, difficult, loving, troubling: poems from around the Bay Area filled my post office box. Some poets spoke of homelessness; some, like Writers Corps teen poet Yvette Buckner shared their despair:

I don’t exist in this place
I have no face, just a voice you hear
crying out silent tears
moving through the crowd of death
Fighting a war that never ends …

Lovell Taylor is a teen who has seen too many street memorials, perhaps has even helped to build a few. His harsh understandings explode on the page:

I am that bullet that makes you bleed
I am that person in yo bad dreams
and you wake up and scream
I am that person who hides from da sun …

Some poems expressed the emotions many of us share when we consider the times, and the wars of these times — in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Sudan, in Palestine. War, of course, is an international issue, and writers reached out to the world with poems of grief, anger, fear, caring, and comradeship. Ishle Park makes the plight of soldiers and love and loss very personal:

i want to talk to you intimately,
about the shadow of war across
your front lawn, the hours spent captive
in front of the tv, the shape of your arms
& his arms entwined like yellow ribbons in sleep.

In creating my project I wanted to show how the music of truth laid on the rhythms of compassion could build the world we want, not by shying away from the realities of our streets, but by embracing them in their totality, and seeing them full of beauty and inspiration as well as cruelty and destruction. Although San Francisco was starting point of the project, the poems reach through the specificity of place and time to truly embrace the world. No matter where you live, you can find your block, your city, your observations, your insights. Perhaps the names will be different, but the spirits will be familiar.

This poetic conversation takes place across generations and through myriad cultures, outside and inside of various poetry styles and communities. Fresh eyes of children mingle with seasoned voices of accomplished poets, heartfelt passions of elders intertwine with electric realities of teens. Indigenous people’s poems sit well with immigrants’ verses, which neighbor those by poets whose American legacy stretches back through many generations. Out of this congress is the beginning of answers grown from a foundation of hope and resolve.

Hundreds of poems were submitted. Many of the strongest poems were published on a San Francisco Public Library-sponsored web site, in the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday Book Review, or in the newsletters of the San Francisco Public Library and Mechanics Institute Library. Those collected here represent the best of the best.

Today my garden is full of rich purple sprays of bougainvillea; and lemons, full and heavy, hang from my lemon tree. Today the sky is again a clear, cloudless, smooth blue, and tonight the scent of jasmine will waft through the air. Today war is being waged, memorials are being raised, and peace is being sought not just in my city, but in cities across America, and in cities around the globe. So if tonight is a night of sirens and gunshots, I will have the paradox of beauty and horror walking hand and hand down the streets where I live, in the city where I live, in the nation where I live, in the world and in the poems that can be found on the other side of the postcard.