SageGreenJournal.org

voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary

photo Douglas A. Salin

Kim Shuck

San Francisco, California


Kim Shuck embraces the fool and jester qualities of being a modern poet and artist. She is a devotee of San Francisco, whose hills she wanders nearly always on foot.

Shuck is widely published in journals, anthologies and a couple of solo books. She enjoys volunteering in SFUSD elementary school classrooms to share her loves of origami, poetry and basket making... in other words, math of various kinds.

In 2019 Shuck was awarded an inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and a PEN Oakland Censorship Award

When the Streetlight Prophet Speaks

by Kim Shuck



We are also the ones

Spoken of in prophesy we

Fence walkers and multi-lingual

Imaginings of bird men, sunflowers and

Rattlesnakes too we time travelers who carry

Our part of one of the fires or maybe the fire is

Gone underground and waits some find themselves

Marked with a scar where a coal was picked

Up just as it looked likely to go out but were written on by

That heat with words of their

Own history just the same on some of us the marks can be faint yes the

Sound of those eastern rivers not even in dreams yes

Still it doesn’t take much breath to relight us all to set a

Whole new generation ablaze


When the Streetlight Prophet Speaks

was published in 2014 in Sidewalk Ndn

by FootHills Publishing



SageGreenJournal.org is a non-commercial project, an online anthology, to share a poetic vision of the land we love.

We have no permanent office although we do have deep roots in western Colorado.

You can write us at Box 160 Norwood CO 81423, or better yet, email us, by clicking 

or, if you use a webmail system, write to hello (at) sagegreenjournal.org