Communities

"Capitalism makes networks. It doesn't make communities. Imagination makes communities."

Robert Hass

I am reading about Robert Hass, who was the US Poet Laureate from 1994-97. His tenure as poet laureate was marked by active efforts to infuse imagination into the public realm and to broaden support for literacy, poetry, and education. His own poetry is an expression of lifelong concerns: "a close attention to the natural world, a sense of self developed in relation to the landscape, and an acute awareness of both the pleasures and pains of being human."

I like the following poem for just that awareness of both beauty and pain.

In California in the early Spring,

There are pale yellow mornings,

When the mist burns slowly into day

The air stings like Autumn,

clarifies like pain-

Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.