Maurya Simon: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems

Maurya Simon

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Maurya Simon

Three Poems

In the Bois de Boulogne

September 1956, Paris

My mother’s braid, a black snake, dangles down

her back, spins around her waist as she turns

from a Parisian poster to watch the bald Spaniard—

short, nimble-footed, bowlegged as a bull dog—

strolling down our lane in this golden park.

I’m five and I know how beautiful she is, despite

her yellow fingertips, crooked teeth, heavy-lidded

Sephardic eyes. We’re taking our après midi stroll

in the Bois—me, my sister, our mother—

while every Frenchman we pass turns to stare at her,

though she doesn’t notice. We’ve brought some

stale breadcrumbs for these iridescent birds

that shimmer like bobbing sultans when the man

nears us, walking a thin grey cat on a blue leash,

making the pigeons scatter into fluttering cries

and feathery alarms. Pardon, Mesdames, he says,

then he stops to look my mother up and down.

My god, she whispers, Picasso, burning beneath his

stare. He wears a paint-stained sailor shirt, the grip

of genius in his grin. He bows low to her, to us,

scoops up his cat and is gone. My mother lights

a Gauloises cigarette, throws back her raven head,

then laughs out a ribbon of smoky joy. Later, she tells

my dad about our brush with fame, saying, Imagine, even the pigeons clapped their wings for him!

Baila Goldenthal, Tamara and Maurya Simon and unknown couple (August 1956, Bois de Boulogne, Paris)

Wildfires

Hell’s ripped open our forests— lambasted, roasted, and scorched them so that they burn on and on for days, weeks, and months like interminable, flame-haired furies.

In Spain, Portugal, France, even down-under in Australia’s koala forests, wildfires are raging, just as they are here in our droughty western expanses of North America.

Doesn’t it seem all the world will end in fire, and not in ice? It’s as if R. Frost posted this end-of-times query, knowing that desire always trumps hatred in matters of the heart.

Or does it? I’d like to think what burns brightest in our souls is a combustible yearning, and not our loathing springing up from an inner coldness deadening

whatever it encounters, numbing us into oblivion. It’s good to know wildfires propagate billions of newborn forests that we’ll never see, but which our great-great grandchildren,

we hope, will amble through with awe, knowing how casually we tossed matches out our collective windows, how our fevered world hasn’t ended yet, but turns its other cheek—

Anthropocene Prayer

A storm is blowing from Paradise. It’s caught in his wings with such violence, the Angel can no longer close them. - Walter Benjamin

With his stalactite-toothed jaw jutting out, and his parchment curls wildly unscrolling, Angelus Novus flaps his chicken-wing arms

and floats above the world on three-toed bird feet. Caught up by history’s cruel winds, he flails his ungainly wings and hums a dirge.

Floods, hurricanes, drought, famines,

heat waves, wildfires, the displacement of millions of climate refugees—

Oh, how to save earth from ourselves to insure its survival? Let’s call the Angel of History to hover above us again,

to awaken the dead and repair the living— Where we perceive a chain of events, the Angel sees one catastrophe and ash, yet he survives…

Trees raise their arms to him in supplication, stars recede: he’s turned backwards to view our past’s wreckage, our endless tragedies—

still, he’ll try to rescue us. Oh, frail seraph, raise up those whom we’ve lost, and help us salvage the earth in order to save ourselves.

Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, oil transfer drawing with watercolor, 1920.

Author Bio:

Maurya Simon’s poetry volumes include her forthcoming, twelfth book, The Blue Bridge (Etruscan Press, 2025) and La Sirena: A Novella in Verse (Cloudbank Books, 2024). Her earlier volume, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Booksellers Association (IPPY). Simon’s poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Greek, Bengali, Rumanian, Spanish, and Farsi. A Fulbright Senior Research Fellow (South India), NEA Poetry Fellow, and a Poetry Society’s Lucille Medwick Memorial and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awardee, she’s served residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators (Sweden), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. Simon’s poems have appeared in a myriad of literary magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and American Literary Review. A Professor Emerita at the University of California, Riverside, Simon lives in the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California.