Evie Groch, President of Ina Coolbrith Circle, is a two-time grand prize winner in the Embassy International Dancing Poets Competition. She writes about travel, languages, immigration and justice in her books, Half the Hurricanes and The Other Shoe.
Trespassers All
By their very nature they set limits, control entry, monitor exits, exact tolls, direct movement, create refugees, force immigration, yet leak and breach as nature ignores their laws. Coyotes and vultures pay no heed, tumbleweeds roll across with abandon, weeds as invaders, streams across closed frontiers, sand dunes melt over the line. Fog wraps us all, citizens, critters, conifers in a common blanket of blind reliance. We, for whom borders were created are born into noncompliance when we emerge— trespassers into life. Sometimes you must trespass to live.
Blades
Taking me back to parks in the summer, open fields of my youth, my father who would lie next to me on a blanket near sunset, staring at the sky the smell of grass permeating our nostrils, conjuring images of misshapen clouds into forms foreign and fantastic as we reminisced about his tailor’s challenges and my accomplishments playing the violin at school. What a pair! One worldly, having traveled widely in search of a home in which to be free, and the other, never having had to seek freedom, but enjoying it just the same. Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights, East L.A. grew the greenest, softest grass that invited us to stretch out on it, savor its scent, to satisfy our curiosity, collaboration, and companionship like only a father and daughter could, a certain scent to bring it all back like a flood.