Poem #4

I actually wrote this poem a year ago, but its one of my favorites and I thought I would post it to celebrate my return to the land of windmills and snow. And maybe motivate me to blog again. It's good to be home.

Holland, MI

I live here.

City of south mitten territory.

And I am always writing of islands,

full of temples and wet tropical heat.

Here we boast impervious to any weather,

when it is 50 degrees in February and snows in April.

Start downtown – where the coffee shops two blocks apart

with letters for names spar lazily for customers.

The streets lined with trees planted by my great-great-grandfather.

Last spring when the tulips bloomed early so only stems were left

by the time the festival brought elephant ears

and wooden-shoed dancers to the streets.

Summer on its heels and the street performers on Thursday nights:

Justin’s card tricks draw a crowd

of round-faced children and their incredulous grown-ups.

There is a belly dancer and a human statue,

and seafoam toffee sweet and spongy from the Peanut Store on the way down 8^th Street.

On the other side of the school, cut across the tracks

to the donut shop on the corner by the train station.

The Amtrak whistles by going south to Chicago,

while students slump together in booths at 2AM when everyone knows

the donuts are hot and fresh and if you ask the man behind the counter

in boxers and an apron he will tell you

about the refugee camps on the way from China.

The neighborhoods thick with 1^st and 3^rd and 4^th Reformed Churches.

You run out of corners at Lake Macatawa 

with the piers full of boats and Kollen Park.

On 17^th Street with Mi Favorita Grocery where you can buy paletas,

and bicycles the local hoodlums strip for parts sit like skeletons in side yards.

Spanish spills from front porches,

families lucky not to live in the migrant camps

who will still leave for Texas in winter.

Temple Tattoos which caters to the impulsive decisions of college students

and high schoolers smelling of pot –

follow them to Smallenburg Park next to the rescue mission,

where the skate park is not quite as good as the one they tore down

so the college could erect a new music building.

Take River Avenue to the north side of town,

past all the buildings plastered with Dutch names:

Dykstra, Dewitt, Van Raalte, VanAndel, VanAnything.

When the houses emerge on the other side they are big and brick-solid.

These are lake folk,

sending their children to schools with Spanish emersion programs,

and toting their little blonde heads to the beach

where the dunes rise and the water is cold and unsalted.

In the winter when the lighthouse ices over

and the waves freeze strange and artic.  

Over the rise the DeVos mansion sprawls like something medieval.

Here we speak of bubbles, which must have shimmering walls.

We point to home on our hands and

put on firm Midwestern pride like winter jackets.

In the morning the lake effect pours relentless from the skies,

blanketing the numbered streets from 1^st to 152^nd.

The train tracks, the forgotten bicycles and the trees downtown. 

All of Holland, covered in snow.