[Music intro]

LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Continuing my presentation of season-appropriate poems, I turn to a poem by Danusha La-méris. Laméris, the daughter of a Dutch father and a Caribbean mother, is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific Universi-ty's low-residency MFA program. Her collections of poetry include The Moons of August and Bonfire Opera and her work has been included in numerous literary journals and anthologies. In 2020, Laméris received the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "Rites of Winter" by Danusha Laméris.

Rites of Winter

We’d been feasting on the famous foods of winter:
squash, potatoes, a steamed pot of dark greens. And after,
we danced in Glenn’s living room above Crystal Creek,
barefoot on the Persian rug, eating chocolate cake,
and almost knocking over the candles. So when the frogs
in the pond out front began to sing—a bass note followed
by a high-pitched exclamation—we slid out the door
and past the tall clusters of bamboo, over the wooden bridge,
moving to the frenzied rhythm of the frogs, who—it seemed—
grew louder and more intent the more we rocked to their cacophony.
So it was frogs and moonlight and dancing under the bare bones
of the trees, the creek suddenly swollen after six years

of drought. And Glenn—one year older and nearing
(though he didn’t know it yet) the end of his greatest love.
And we were calling out to the frogs, who called back to us
as we stumbled, nearly into the bracken water,
and leapt unto the pond-side boulders, hands in the air,
a light mist falling on our arms, our upturned faces.

And I couldn’t decide: was the world enamored with itself?—
all this riotous back and forth? Or had we only
invoked alarm, amphibian for get-back! get-back!
I don’t know. But how happy we were, for that hour,
to believe we were one marvelous body, in our smooth
and slippery skin. Even if the frogs did not want us.
Even if our joint fates are written, already,
in the tainted water, in the dark and opulent mud.

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Depart-ment of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast will be available on the Library’s website. In the future, episodes will be available on iTunes, Google, and Spotify. Thanks for listening!

[Music outro]

• Back to Poems on Air: Episode 37



DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a certified or verbatim transcript, but rather represents only the context of the class or meeting, subject to the inherent limitations of real-time captioning. The primary focus of real-time captioning is general communication access and as such this document is not suitable, acceptable, nor is it intended for use in any type of legal proceeding. Transcript provided by the author.