April is Poetry Month, which is appropriate for us since we recently announced the winners of the Artsmith poetry contest, plus we're getting ready to co-produce A River & Sound Review on May 31st at the Orcas Center with a performance featuring our contest winners, and judge, Marvin Bell.  Jay Bates is the founder and host of this lively literary variety show.  In honor of poetry month, and in eager anticipation of the the show, below is one of my favorite poems by Bell.

These Green-Going-to-Yellow

This year, I'm raising the emotional ante, putting my face in the leaves to be stepped on, seeing myself among them, that is; that is, likening leaf-vein to artery, leaf to flesh, the passage of a leaf in autumn to the passage of autumn, branch-tip and winter spaces to possibilities, and possibility to God. Even on East 61st Street in the blowzy city of New York, someone has planted a gingko because it has leaves like fans like hands, hand-leaves, and sex. Those lovely Chinese hands on the sidewalks so far from delicacy or even, perhaps, another gender of gingko-- do we see them? No one ever treated us so gently as these green-going-to-yellow hands fanned out where we walk. No one ever fell down so quietly and lay where we would look when we were tired or embarrassed, or so bowed down by humanity that we had to watch out lest our shoes stumble, and looked down not to look up until something looked like parts of people where we were walking. We have no experience to make us see the gingko or any other tree, and, in our admiration for whatever grows tall and outlives us, we look away, or look at the middles of things, which would not be our way if we truly thought we were gods. Marvin Bell