by Kim Shuck
This morning I hear the singing One mountain to another
Across valley and piped creek
Rock
Tumbling in culvert
Translating water into
Serpentine thoughts
When they moved the star map
I could hear her singing
Can hear her singing now
Can hear her learning
Granite story
Heat and cooling
We are all stories in series
The water we are
The water that has carried us
Has carried stone
Has cracked a surface has
Sung through the culverts
Another kind of mapping of
Writing
A travel story a
Song of staying and of
Shifting
A song called across this valley from this mountain to another
A scatter
A collection
I found a scrap of you
Wrenched from your hill
Mounted on a museum wall
We sang quiet songs to one other
All afternoon
Dissident rocks that we are
Just today I could hear our home hills
The waters that polished us
Humming an answer
Copyright Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.
Kim Shuck, a native of San Francisco whose work explores her multiethnic roots, is San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate.
A lifelong resident of San Francisco, Shuck lives in the Castro district. Her poetry collections include Clouds Running In, Rabbit Stories, Smuggling Cherokee and Deer Trails. Shuck also teaches at the California College of Art, in the diversity department, and has taught at San Francisco State University. She has volunteered in San Francisco Unified School District classrooms for two decades. www.kimshuck.com
