My parents traded their smoggy life in L.A. for
this expanse of blue sky
They swapped glistening ocean waves for mountain views,
Abandoned tide pools for xeriscaping.
I coaxed my roots into the thirsty, cracked soil
But I don’t even like chile, red or green
And I’ve never watched Breaking Bad.
I once envisioned myself happy among cypress trees and ruins
Soaking in syllables from Italian lips and fast bronze hands
Building a quiet future on the blood-soaked soil of
long-gone empire.
I would have traded pink mountains and family dinners
For bread and wine and cobblestone streets
And the surreal high of a place where past and present
endure, enmeshed.
But I have stayed under the searing summer sun,
Unbothered by the relentless April wind,
My marks made in ephemeral red dust.
My family remains here, as permanent as those watchful
mountains
Predictable as the sharp smoke from roasted chile in the
fall
And so I stay.
And so I stay.
I like the line "I coaxed my roots into the thirst, cracked soil." It's a very "alive" line. I also like when adjectives affect multiple senses at once -- when I see "thirsty [..] soil," it's something I could feel physically as well as see in terms of image. ... It's interesting how we could love and appreciate a place, even as we long for or appreciate very different environments. It seems a lot of us compared a "here" and a "there" in these poems, and I think that says a lot about the complexity of place and belonging and speaks well to a lot of the things we've read for this class.
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