After Reading A Book …

After Reading A Book Of Old Chinese Poetry, I Stay Awake Tonight And Write This Poem

A beautiful place is the town of Lo-Yang.
The big streets are full of spring light.
Wen-Ti, 5th century, CE

A beautiful place is the little town of Claremont. The quiet streets are lined by ancient trees. Down the long avenues of old houses, pepper trees, sycamores, cedars, oaks and elms, eucalyptus, palms and jacarandas translate sunlight into restful shadows. Flowers are everywhere, and citrus trees. Lemons and oranges ornament the gardens. Students walk by, with their books, to the colleges. Townspeople walk together to the village. From parks and schoolyards childrens voices call. Sunday mornings: churches ring their bells.

On a clear day you can see the mountains where children play, in winter, in the snow; and long trails lead to streams and waterfalls. Deer and mountain lions walk the mountains. Rattlesnakes doze for hours in the sun. Some days the ponds are visited by bears who stumble home with their bellies full of trout.

Unable to sleep, I leave my house tonight and sit at my wooden table under the trees. Now the winds and birds have settled; the night is still. The owl in the cedar tree begins to bell. Rose and jasmine burn their sticks of incense. Moonlight falls on Claremont through the clouds. I remember Po Chuis poem about the cranes. In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss, the garden boy is leading the cranes home.

How strange and powerful, the love of home. Stranger still to be alive at all; to be anywhere in all its endless detail, and the millions of tiny locks that will be broken before you can be released from where you are, to return again forever to the place, so many years ago, you started from the nothing that is everywhere but here.

michael creagan

Michael Creagan, the oldest of seven children, grew up in the city of New Haven, and then the town of Hamden, in Connecticut. He graduated in 1970 from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and has been working as a doctor ever since. For the past 28 years, he has worked as an emergency medicine specialist at San Antonio Community Hospital in Upland, California. For about 40 years, he has been writing poetry.