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Design: Niya C. Sisk

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
– Mother Teresa

Newly reborn, Elizabeth Hack’s inspiring website – San Francisco Peace and Hope — takes its cue from the way we breathe. Inhale, exhale; one breath, one death – the two go together like sleeping and waking, or time and eternity. What dissolves? What lasts? “There is no ahead,” the ancient poet Rumi whispered, reminding us that the only time we have is now. As stubbornly as we rewind or fast-forward to access a remembered past or an imagined future, we experience nothing ongoing until we hit play, which always brings us home to the moment unfolding. Deathless truths, a.k.a. eternal verities – forever arousing, ever virginal – get transmitted and recycled by way of poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, music, drama and dance. With this first breath, everything begins. For an instantaneous down-to-earth take on peace and hope, ask any baker of sourdough bread about starters. As we may label every episode in life chapter one, so every post to this elegant, survival-loving site will always seem the first.

— fragment from One Two-Step Foreword by Al Young

Click here to go to the original at San Francisco Peace and Hope

WHO WE ARE

San Francisco Peace and Hope
PO Box 8057
Berkeley, CA 94707

Advisor
Al Young, California poet laureate emeritus

Web Designer
Niya C. Sisk, MFA, Ritual Labs, Principal, Creative Director
Visit Niya’s Place

Founder/Editor
Elizabeth Hack

Elizabeth Hack, Niya C. Sisk, and Al Young. December 18, 2010

About Elizabeth Hack

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click on the eiffel tower

JJWebb/Cruzio Blues Café

To animate the avatar of Al Young reading and singing with the Dartanyan Brown Trio, click here.
Dartanyan Brown, bass | Jorge Molina, piano | Sly Randolph, drums

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APRIL IN PARIS

after Yip Harburg & Vernon Duke

It was here in that one-time, one-step, lighted blue
of Paris at ease, close to the Cluny, in splendid,
straight-up noontime shadow that your slow and
measuring eyes met more than their burning match.

The smooth warmth of your whisper along my neck,
the nappy back of it, where you’d peeled back
its soft, excited collar to tell me everything you’d learned
or discerned in a city where love and prices flirt.

A product of standstill winters, sudden summers, sultry
prejudice, and heartland steak-and whiskey afternoons,
you’d blown in from the States, an orphan of the arts –
Mary Cassatt , Josephine Baker, Mary Lou Williams,

Jean Seberg. What breathlessness overtakes me here?
Brushing and combing out memories of your touch,
in a season as uncertain as coastal fog moving inland
from the loveless edges of that country we’d both fled,

I shiver. Whom could we run to if not one another?
Back home we knew what it was like to be the other –
displaced, despised, imprisonable. We watched and fought.
The colors of loss deepened. Yearning to break free,

unconsciously American, we counted our chickens, certain
that the ships we’d always banked on would sail in.
In Paris, our adopted country of each other’s arms,
whose borders blurred all time, all common market sense,

we saved the slow but steady squeeze of night, of time,
the way it smothered darkness, the way it mothered light.
The April of your frightened French was like that, too;
you had no words for holiday tables, for chestnuts in bloom.

Parisian light, like light at home — Detroit, Des Moines –
lit up your waifish eyes. I said, “Think twice before you speak.”
Over here you mostly knew the blues; rue rhymed with blue.
There couldn’t be too much light, too much touch.

Al Young
© 2001, 2006, 2008 by Al Young

Meet the Poet-Animator

Animation and design
© 2008 by J.J. Webb a.k.a. Beau Blue

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clickable

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