250 YEARS IN POEMS BY ALICE PERO, PETER LUDWIN AND SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM
In the first issue of the CSPS Poetry Letter of 2026, the year of the 250th Birthday Celebration of the United States of America, we featured artwork from the national art collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and a symbol of joy, hot-air balloons floating above Albuquerque, New Mexico. The second issue is dedicated to the multicultural richness of our great nation by presenting English language poetry written in America by poets of diverse immigrant backgrounds. Of the three featured poets and one artist, two have roots in New York (Alice Pero and Vera Campion), one poet's father came from Vienna, Austria (the adventurous and well-traveled Peter Ludwin), and one was born in Malacca City when it was a part of the British Empire (Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara). They draw from their unique memories, impressions, experiences and knowledge to create fascinating and inspiring verse. Three of them are friends and frequent collaborators—Vera and Alice worked on two books; Alice and Peter shared many readings. Our book reviewer, Michael Escoubas, enriched this tapestry with poems by Kathleen Gregg and Lynn Fitzgerald.
The whole issue is edited by a relatively recent immigrant from Poland, celebrating 30 years of living in this country as its citizen and a proud participant of Independence Day parades in Sunland Tujunga, giving out poetry postcards since 2010. Since becoming an American, I enjoy my favorite holiday, appreciating it even more because I was raised in the Peoples’ Republic of Poland, a Soviet satellite “socialist” state that supposedly had embodied the principle of socialism—“to each according to their work.” What a monumental lie! I much prefer the unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Happy 250th Birthday, USA!!!
~ Maja Trochimczyk, CSPS President
Independence Day
Red — are the rocks of the Grand Canyon
White — are the mountains, covered with snowBlue — are the waves of Pacific Ocean
Red, White and Blue — colors of all.
Red — is the Earth from which we come
White — is the Air that fills our lungsBlue — is the Water inside us, with Stardust
Red, White and Blue — connected in all.
Red — is pure Love, deep in our hearts
White — is the Brightness of our mindsBlue — is the Peace of well-lived lives
Red, White and Blue — freedom for all.
(C) 2018 by Maja Trochimczyk
Pero is an eminent California poet, flutist, poetry teacher and cultural activist. She has published poetry in many magazines and anthologies, including Nimrod, National Poetry Review, River Oak Review, Poet Lore, The Alembic, North Dakota Quarterly, The Distillery, Fox Cry Review, The Griffin, G.W. Review, California Quarterly, Coiled Serpent, Wide Awake, Altadena Poetry Review, and many others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Altadena Poetry Review and California Quarterly. Her book of poetry, Thawed Stars, was praised by Kenneth Koch as having “clarity and surprises.” She also published a chapbook Sunland Park Poems, written as a dialogue with Elsa Frausto. Pero teaches poetry and is a member of California Poets in the Schools, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering students to express their uniqueness through writing, performing and publishing their own poetry. She joined the CSPS Board as a Director at Large in May 2019 and became the Chair of Monthly Poetry Contests in January 2020. She was elected the 10th Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga in April 2020 and in 2022 became the Artistic Director of the Village Poets Monthly Readings. She is also the founder of Moonday, a reading series in the Los Angeles area for upwards of sixteen years. Ms. Pero has created dialogue poems with more than twenty poets. She also created the performing group, Windsong Players Chamber Ensemble and performs as a flutist.
Leaves Fallingleaves fall
over the telephone wires
with soft grace
with no apparent plan
or sense of haste
the yellow ones have the sun
burning in them
nothing urgent makes them
spin downward
in the passing breeze
they have mastered the plan,
the yearly dying
and what telephone lines carry
in scrambled complexity
are nothing to them
they fall in free time
and have no knowledge of the volts
and vexations of man
traveling in milliseconds
through telephone lines
they flit through these
vehicles of force,
insouciant, careless and free
Alice Pero, first published in Poet Lore Vol. 103 No. 3-4 (2008)
Porches
Porches
contain the sounds of summer
doors creaking
mosquitoes
carrying on tiny battles outside
miniscule batting of wings
over the pond
Porches
blur us with color
and sweetness
wisteria
dripping over stone walls
a container of honey
bees’ invisible work
humming through screens
Porches
bring us back to ourselves
permeable
as are we
absorbent
taking in
every cricket
every frog
Heat
The day sweats
Cicadas wrinkle the air
with vibrations
Trees lie drunk
in pond’s rippling surface
Young birches lean toward each other
whispering like thin women gossiping
Over water lilies a white moth flies
pushed in abstract patterns
by some erratic hidden hand
Pond turns to green glass
Only a few birds are left singing
while we curl up hot and dripping
salty in late summer sun
my feet attached to the sky
I have learned to hold onto clouds
their whispers in my ears
foretelling the future
I have left the air
my head on fire
my wings singed and crumbling
falling without parachute
or mind
I have asked the wind
for advice,
followed breezes into canyons
balanced on rocky streams
waited for lizards
to tell me their names
I have disappeared in moon’s shadow
lurked in bottomless lakes
broke fast with moths
sipping honeysuckle
stained as I am
with the fathomless green
then she will delight in play with them
stretch sinew, bow, pull head’s bones high
in proud princess pose, click bone bells, prance
pas de chat bones, grand jeté land soft to cushion bones
Bones don’t cry or ache
She’ll grab body with bones,
shove onto flying machine into vast sky
slam down again to the ground to find ski slopes
Bones are slammed around corners,
slid down treacherous passes
Oh why is it these bones don’t break?
These bones don’t even know their own names
yet still they hold true, straight and stalwart
Soul running bones through their racehorse paces
sticks and stones won’t stop these bones
soul dancing the bones’ formations
She’ll do it all for bones’ sake
this walk in the park
where we slap each others’ bottoms,
practice bird calls, caterwaul like alley cats,
roll down grassy hills, roll in muddy water,
take turns in the brambles?
Those who think they have only once chance around
cry at every scratch,
lie half-stunned in sunlight,
weep and moan at doors closing
Who is tough, the child leaping into the muddy pond?
The walking wounded who keep coming back?
Fly into the thick of it while you can
Dance in thistles, run stir-crazed in the rain
Wild horses don’t have half your beauty,
words thrown madly to the wind
Gold of No SubstanceThe calligrapher holds the pastwith each stroke, marks against time,The dull thud of each death erased in a poem,the permanent traceDays that are weighted in metaphor can fly off,careless leaveslike the memory of dragonfly flight,heavy with beauty that has no beginning or endThe artist’s will as strong as the most delicate lace,indelible in memory,gold that has no substance,what we feed onfuture’s fuel
must scoop up God’s ashes
and clean the trays
Saintly ways make for no complaint
Newspapers bray of madmen
drugs and implanted with murderous rages
Puppets kill
while masters play the strings
The soldier stands with
scraps and patches of dignity
Children in huts learn hate
This thing called life
can’t be beaten
though it turns upon itself
and howls
Ashes fall from heaven
Prickly Pear
The prickly pear puts outa tiny red blossomto light the path
We tiptoe throughwith snuffed candleslest we bring fire
Peter Ludwin is the award-winning author of four books of poetry. His newest collection, An Altar of Tides, won the 2024 Trail to Table Editors’ Award in Poetry from Trail to Table Press. His previous book, Gone to Gold Mountain, which addressed the little-known massacre of over thirty Chinese gold miners in Hells Canyon in 1887, was nominated for an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. In addition to receiving a 2007 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, he won the 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award from The Comstock Review for the poem “Wolf Concerto,” judged by Marge Piercy, and the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Endeavor and Excellence in Poetry from the San Miguel Poetry Week in Mexico, in which he was a longtime participant. Most recently, his poem “Terezin Concentration Camp, Bohemia” won the California State Poetry Society’s “Place” themed contest for August, 2025. An adventurer who has travelled from the Amazon to Morocco to Tibet, poems from which appear in his second book, Rumors of Fallible Gods, he is particularly focused on history/social justice, physical and spiritual aspects of the natural world and different cultures. He lives in Kent, Washington. Find him at www.peterludwin.com.
Notes from a Sodbuster’s Wife, Kansas, 1868
What really got us in the end—
we women who didn’t make it,
who withered and blew away in the open—
was the wind. Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston.
But above all, the wind.
In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts,
vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness,
boils up off the horizon to suck dry
their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses.
Not convinced? Scan the photographs,
grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather.
Study our bony forms in plain black dresses,
our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch,
accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed.
I tried. Lord knows I tried.
Survived the locusts and even snakes
that fell from the ceiling at night,
slithering between us in bed.
I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell
of dead leaves banked against a rotting log.
I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone.
Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls.
The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Cheyenne,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,
not even a purpose one could name.
Satori
That night in Lajitas
I saw all we are given to see:
in your veins domed cities, empires,
and in your face dawn over Machu Picchu.
Was that a guitar where your teeth,
like Lorca’s poems,
flashed diamond bits toward Mexico?
I heard gypsies shape the moon
and your hips bring languid
rhythms of the silk trade.
It was all so clear,
the way Vermeer’s blues and yellows
define the very sound of color.
That’s why this distance now,
with no way to reach you,
rumbles like thunderheads that threaten
but bring no rain, no rain.
(for Lois)
Though neither Catholic nor Christian,
you enter this church in Guanajuato.
An old, half-remembered song has drawn
you’re here, a devotional candle whose pale
tongue flickers when you curl upon
yourself, a wave pouring over its crest.
You seem so natural on your knees,
a cloister child yearning for sisterhood.
That opaque mantle of silence
in which the rustle of a habit
across the cold stone floor crackles
with a kiss, a fleeting touch denied.
A routine quick to become familiar:
terce, vespers, matins,
bells tolling for a door pulled shut
as they herald canonical hours.
And all the while ecstasy mushrooms
like a fetus, a glorious weed
crowding out inferior plants.
A stalk you climb with intent:
the long, slow plunge
into a godhead of fire and roses.
But we are speaking of today, this life.
Bowed over interlocking hands,
you don’t see the pigeon
just below the ceiling
flap its wings,
then plummet across the nave.
The stunning arc of its descent,
like a plane
curtailing its dive
at the last possible second,
propels it through a side door
into brilliant, windswept blue.
Peter Ludwin, published in Poem. Also in his second book, Rumors of Fallible Gods.
Long after the flesh had vanished
a sheepherder found it at Deep Creek.
It belonged to one of the Chinese miners
massacred for gold in Hells Canyon.
A bullet had blown a whole section
away, but this did not discourage
the sheepherder from turning it
into a sugar bowl. The sort
of relic one might find
in a collectibles store or the dusty,
web-framed attic of an eccentric
who died of cumulative failure.
Was it you, Chea Po, who contained
this sweetness? Held its promise?
I like to think you weren’t one
of the bodies washed up downstream
after weeks in the river.
That you remained on a gravel bar
where you’d panned for flakes,
watched by wary bighorns. It is important
for me—a stranger writing over a century
after the murders—to imagine you there.
More than artifact the morning light reveals.
For whom water speaks a lost language.
not that it mattered—what compelled her
to do it. After hours
playing quartets with friends, to head out alone
down an unexplored logging road, step with her
viola into a clear-cut and accompany there
a half dozen browsing elk. The piece she chose,
Borodin’s Nocturne, caused them only to look up
from their forage, then lower their heads again,
this music preferable to the raven croaks
they knew by heart. But what began
as intimation, the contours of an ill-defined urge,
took shape the longer she bowed to the bow,
a low moon rising fat between a bull’s antlers
the image that made it clear. Never mind
that his anxious snort drew the cows over a ridgeline,
their cotton hindquarters white flags of truce
that vanished like hope. Here among stumps
and slash she was performing, she understood
with each legato stroke, a sonata for hoof
and root. For that Lazarus chambered like a filbert
within its shell who slowly rose from her tomb
as if shocked back to unexpected life,
shroud ablaze at her feet.
(for Jill)
Do you meditate before you write?
No, I don’t cross my legs and gaze
at a blank screen, don’t open my palms
in surrender. But what else would I call
those walks along the stream behind my house,
if not a meditation? Each time I find
a different river, each time the mind empties out
to make room for guests: a pair of mallards
sunning themselves on a tuft of grass,
a snag angled out from the bank,
the scowl of a deeply grooved cottonwood,
a gang of crows swarming the trees
like flies to an animal gone down.
Walking the north end of Orcas Island
I sting from the wind’s brutal bite.
Hunched as far into myself as formal
practice would ever take me, I ask you this:
Isn’t observation a form of joining,
a manifest of intent? The sound
of Basho’s frog going plop! binds me
like a ring. What is our wealth,
our dragon hoard,
if not a moth’s silky powder?
One could do worse than plunge into petunias,
finger with delicate grip blossoms gone limp
and ease them from their sheaths—
a tactic known as “deadheading”—do worse
than clasp like a brooch the raw, fecund wild,
succor from bush and tree and stream,
from moss, from serrated ridge a salve,
an ointment menthol rich and deep.
Isn’t this what seers, cranks, those visionary scolds
have always done? Starved for Truth,
for revelation, Siddhartha flees his palace
only to return years later and find, in shards of light,
that jewel heretofore hidden: the river
he forsook, always and never the same.
Thoreau builds his cabin at Walden,
unaware he hammers into planks not mere nails
but myth. Hiking the Sierra Nevada on a few
crusts of bread, John Muir inhales a balm
beyond the human, its despoliating greed.
Edward Abbey, fierce as his desert stronghold,
assails American ranchers: “The whole West
stinks of cattle!” If you clip a fading
dahlia’s stalk, a woman tells me,
the plant will form new buds to replace it.
When the edict was read
I became shadow
skirting the plaza
a dark speck upon the sun
let me tell you
the torture of flesh is an old story
one goes unconscious and it ends
but the wild dog
let loose on the mind
hourly savages his bone.
Because choice rattles its empty cup
because light blasphemes
blackened windows
the reproach of the mirror
solders my dry mouth shut:
at dawn I lurch through quicksand
with my basket of eggs
a lopped limb
growing back each night.
Oh I am the musky witch
whose breasts spill sour wine
a dead leaf falling
solar and lunar eclipse
look for the goatherd in Edom
the sandy wastes of the Philistines
without rights
without compass
Gideon has fled with his three hundred
and there are none to sound her name
Why Lorca Matters
Because even the olive laments the ditch,the rusted, half-buried saber. Because windnow bullies horses grazing their shadows.
Because an old man remembers the tricksterwho whittled his tongue with copper: blood fuguein the throat, the startled fish that swam there.
Because he was un hombre, a caballero whose words,streaked with the ruinous glory of wax,wounded Death. Parted the burning lake.
Somewhere the slashed curtain, somewhere the pistol,gold-plated, that scatters the breath of baboons.And always a scarcity of water.
“At present, the phenomena of butchering, drowning and leaving to die female infants have been very serious”. The People's Daily, Peking, March 3rd, 1983
They say a child with two mouths is no good.
In the slippery wet, a hollow space,
Smooth, gumming, echoing wide for food.
No wonder my man is not here at his place.
In the slippery wet, a hollow space,
A slit narrowly sheathed within its hood.
No wonder my man is not here at his place:
He is digging for the dragon jar of soot.
That slit narrowly sheathed within its hood!
His mother, squatting, coughs by the fire's blaze
While he digs for the dragon jar of soot.
We had saved ashes for a hundred days.
His mother, squatting, coughs by the fire's blaze.
The child kicks against me mewing like a flute.
We had saved ashes for a hundred days,
Knowing, if the time came, that we would.
The child kicks against me crying like a flute
Through its two weak mouths. His mother prays
Knowing when the time comes that we would,
For broken clay is never set in glaze.
Through her two weak mouths his mother prays.
She will not pluck the rooster nor serve its blood,
For broken clay is never set in glaze:
Women are made of river sand and wood.
She will not pluck the rooster nor serve its blood.
My husband frowns, pretending in his haste
Women are made of river sand and wood.
Milk soaks the bedding. I cannot bear the waste.
My husband frowns, pretending in his haste.
Oh, clean the girl, dress her in ashy soot!
Milk soaks our bedding. I cannot bear the waste.
They say a child with two mouths is no good.
Learning to Love America
because the Pacific Ocean sweeps along the coastline
because the water of the ocean is cold
and because land is better than ocean.
because I say we rather than they.
because I live in California
I have eaten fresh artichokes
and jacaranda bloom in April and May.
because my senses have caught up with my body
my breath with the air it swallows
my hunger with my mouth.
because I walk barefoot in my house.
because I have nursed my son at my breast
because he is a strong American boy
because I have seen his eyes redden
when he is asked who he is
because he answers I don't know.
because to have a son is to have a country
because my son will bury me here
because countries are in our blood and we bleed them
because it is late and too late to change my mind
because it is time.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, First pub. What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say, West End Press, 1998; Fooling with Words, ed. Bill Moyers, 1999
Last night I dreamt in Chinese.
Eating Yankee shredded wheat
I said it in English
To a friend who answered
In monosyllables:
All of which I understood.
The dream shrank to its fiction.
I had understood its end
Many years ago. The sallow child
Ate rice from its ricebowl
And hides still in the cupboard
With the china and tea-leaves.
The air is wet, soaks
Into mattresses, and curls
In apparitions of smoke.
Like fat white slugs furled
Among the timber,
Or sliver fish tunneling
The damp linen covers
Of schoolbooks, or walking
Quietly like centipedes,
The air walking everywhere
On its hundred feet
Is filled with the glare
Of tropical water
Again we are taken over
By clouds and rolling darkness.
Small snails appear
Clashing their timid horns
Among the morning glory
Vines.
Drinking milo,
Nyonya and baba sit at home.
This was forty years ago.
Sarong-wrapped they counted
Silver paper for the dead,
Portraits of grandfathers
Hung always in the parlour.
Reading Tennyson, at six
p.m. in pajamas,
Listening to down-pour-
ing rain; the air ticks
With gnats, black spiders fly,
Moths sweep out of our rooms
Where termites built
Their hills of eggs and queens zoom
In heat. We wash our feet
For bed, watch mother uncoil
Her snake hair, unbuckle
The silver mesh around her waist,
Waiting for father pacing
The sands as fishers pull
From the Straits after monsoon.
Like sleepers rocked in the pantun,
Sheltered by Malacca
This was forty years ago,
When nyonya married baba.
Riding Into CaliforniaIf you come to a land with no ancestorsto bless you, you have to be your ownancestor. The veterans in the mobile homepark don’t want to be there. It isn’t easy.Oil rigs litter the land like giant frozen birds.Ghosts welcome us to a new life, andan immigrant without home ghostscannot believe the land is real. So you’regrateful for familiarity, and Bruce Leebecomes your hero. Coming into Fullerton,everyone waiting at the station is white.The good thing about being Chinese on Amtrackis no one sits next to you. The bad thing isyou sit alone all the way to Irvine.
Hello
Hello, white page! Hello, dear possible!
I greet you as friend open to questions.
I greet you as sage, silent, never
to speak. I greet you as my child,
stammering, words not yet mastered,
tears in your eyes. Greet you as stranger
whose language comes from afar, lisping,
guttural, whose speakers have scattered.
I greet you as fire just breaking
in dry brush that will burn the old world.
Greet you, towering Diana, arrow
tipped to the target. I greet you as
Self, untutored, reading your blank gaze.
is American identity, I was told.
Never saw why, until that morning
at the Met. Catskills, the green-bodied
and lively river, twining
on canvas, vaster than actual
dimensions: oiled depth, receding
shadows---West Point, Peekskill--,
I’d driven past, tight-assed, anxious,
by eight-wheelers. I’d been killed
nine times over in near crashes.
There, four-framed order secured,
America glows. A waterfall rushes
held up by color for all time.
The man in the blue coat stands quiet
as I do, gazing at rimmed
mountains, clouds’ roving light,
like subdued sheep, nature sublime,
domestication sublime.
In these rooms,
Hudson River billow
moves, settles down to nation’s
dark, white, brown, yellow:
water, air above, earth underfoot,
restless as genius, fixed, and flow.
Morning after the rains, blossoms
pop up yellow among their weedy
tendrils; white in the citrus massy
branches; scarlet burning bush plums
budding; purple in the sage;
and orange, orange, orange poppies
to say, Hello, California. These,
like poems common on the page,
lowly or showy, tall sprung spiky
splurges out of succulents
that survive on dew, sky silent
sprinkled as, surprised by rain, we
forget our dry winter heat. Poetry
needs rain in drought years like creeks
need rain to murmur, like dried sticks
need rain to root, and roots to be
the trees written in their memory,
like angels need rain to praise
heaven, like babies need rain to raise
their sippy cups, like the poppy
needs rain to wave on its stem,
like I need rain to write the poem.
where we pick two, three, or five most mornings
for our breakfast table. Careless branches
drop sweet-sour green-yellow fruit, like flinging
gum to a crowd all through April and May,
until neighbors tire of plenty; excepting
the newcomers, for whom, decades passing,
plenty remains a miracle. Each day
unexpected, each morning miraculous
sunrise in a new country. Although want-want
blows like Santa Annas sparking ashes
on candy-striped lounges and awnings
under dry fronds above bungalows, although
coyote lairs in brittle eucalyptus
burn, although in uneasy zigzag land
rifts, although thirst and desert brown
the homeless children of plenty,
although new and old split apart, unknown
to each other, we will persist in praising
the lime tree spring, newcomers to our town,
too many for the breaking earth to tear down.
Can I catch a firefly?Put the wind in a bottle?You ask me to explainand there is only mistGoing to a place where thereare more than answersdeath, a mythAlice PeroVera Campion
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