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