​POETRY  -  
          With a Theme of Work

An office building near Spear Street - San Francisco    -    photo by Charlene Anderson                                                                        

Custodian of the Light in San Francisco
by  Karen Marker

​​today at noon when I see you as you cross the street,
carefully holding your trash can  
like the hand of a toddler, carrying  
 
ever so steady your carton of cleaners
I want to stop right there, teary-eyed
take you in my arms to say thank you
 
for this most beautiful day, as if you created
every one of these towers, their scraping
steel edges cutting the open sky, their windows   
 
without a speck of dust reflecting this brilliant
light, making the blue come through  
so clean it looks white, while the pavement
 
glistens with a billion suns, all these newfound galaxies.
What a secret you’ve kept, going on doing your work
in this city eerily empty of commuters, consumers.
 
How quietly you are keeping up everything I almost miss
you on my way to writing poetry in a class on Spear
Street and now don’t even know your name.

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​​Karen Marker submits poems to Rattle’s Poets Respond (to the news) and reads this poetry on the open mic with RattleCast. This past May she was a featured reader for Rivertown Poets out of Petaluma. Karen was honored to win first place prize for an essay, “Ruth in the Redwoods,” in the 2021 Keats Soul Making contest and that one of her poems was chosen to be in the Kent State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives. Karen is also grateful that she had the opportunity to work with the Young Writers Program through Santa Cruz’s Cornerstone Project, and to work with so many talented poets through PandaPoets and through OLLI including Kathleen McClung, Diane Frank and Jannie Dresser.

Other pieces in this Issue:  
Poetry:
Going Back to Work in Retrospect
Passing My Swim Test in the Freedom Summer
Customer Service

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