[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: When we think of the year 2020, it will be with an overwhelming sense of loss of unimaginable numbers of American lives due to COVID-19. This grief, however, is no less potent than the grief we feel for the loss of others for non-COVID reasons, especially those taken suddenly and unexpectedly. Poet Ralph Angel is among that number. I didn’t know Ralph well but he was always kind and generous when our paths did cross. His good friend, David St. John, says that Ralph’s “poems lie in that space between Miles Davis’s raw passion and John Ashberry’s lyrical dreams.” An award-winning poet, a distinguished professor at the University of Redlands, and a respected member and mentor to many of us in the Los Angeles family of writers, Ralph passed away after a brief illness on March 6, 2020, with his wife, Mary, by his side.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "And the Grass Did Grow" by Ralph Angel.

And the Grass Did Grow

Nothing is happening,
and yet what is being acted out
or proven right now, flamboyantly,
might just turn a corner
and become the real thing.

Mostly holed up in a room
somewhere, or pacing the twilit
underworld of the neighborhood,
another honest display of emotion taking up
its fair share of available space,
and all the desire I can possibly
imagine, like a stone flung,
inscribing its arc of air.

But living is fickle, open-ended,
even the little myths break down.
Nobody thinks I’m very funny.

In fact, they’re insulted.
They’ve exacted their portions
and now appear rather chipper,
scattering me over the hillsides

and into the night.
Like a pedestrian in a crosswalk
replaced by another man, I go with them.
And I don’t go. The need remains
forever: to have, to get my hands on,
or to be taken, to lose myself
in a warmer, less urgent caress.

I open one eye, take a look around.
No pat answers, no permanence or rest.
Someone just happens to keep beginning,
and my life too, where I left it,
over there.

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department 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!

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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.