Poems by Anna Citrino

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Among the Tennessee Pines

by Anna Citrino

From Canary Fall 2018

Anna grew up in the San Diego River watershed. She taught abroad for 26 years in six different countries. She currently lives at the edge of Moore's Creek in the San Lorenzo-Soquel watershed of Santa Cruz County.

All those pines rambling over rocky ground, ridge tops
       and cliff slopes
in the Great Smoky Mountains—long-leaf pine and short,
       Table Mountain,
pitch, loblolly, Virginia and white, spread between scarlet
       oaks,
the hickory and maple— the pines of my childhood
       adventures
accompanied me as I tramped beneath their branches.

Mother, father, brothers, we walked beside each other,
birds and sun drifting through the basket of branches.
We ate and played under the perfumed presence of pine.

Standing on a morning ridge top, the ocean of pines
rose on the wave of hills. Wind rippled the trees,
rinsed the air with music.
Clouds drifted by.

Black bear and elk, otter, fox, chipmunk, salamanders—the
       wilderness
carried them all in its pockets, hidden inside its canopy of timber.

This was the beginning of my life. As far as I could see
the pines’ green boughs touched everything that lived,
and the sky billowed with light.




Cutting the Oak

by Anna Citrino

From Canary Summer 2020

We knew we needed to do it—cut the oak
that nearly reached the house. Though too many
trees have disappeared, though we didn’t smell smoke,
a wood house burns, and summer after summer,
fires have charred California’s hills and homes.
It was important to protect the house and neighborhood.
So he climbed the tree, and began the task.

Saw blade screeching and grinding at its back, the oak
leaned and bent slowly, a great, deep bow
to the machine’s unceasing wail.
The branch that had grown for decades
stooped low, lower, then with a crack, broke
and dropped to earth in a gargantuan, inert thud.

Abruptly, the chainsaw fell quiet.
The trees beside the fallen oak made no sound,
but there was a shift like the pause between breaths.

The world turned strangely still, air thick
with scent of leaf dust.
Scattered scrabble everywhere.
Moist cold oozed from the newly cut litter of limbs.

Through the newly opened space, sky tumbled
to the leaf-strewn earth.

Then, the chipper’s thick glottal growl began.
In a few hours its teeth shredded thirty years of branches
with a roar and turned them into mulch.

About me lies the oak whose breadth once held
squirrels and birds in its sturdy arms, its beauty
reduced to naked frame and fragment.

In the distance, hills continue to burn, threatening
to turn the world to ash.

I stand quietly in the forest floor’s light
surveying the sacrifice. There is this tree,
the world beyond,
and wounds that can’t be escaped
or denied.




Delhi's Weather Report Reads "Smoke"

by Anna Citrino

From Canary Summer 2019

Paint fumes and Hexol, natural gas, pesticides,
and the smoke of burning excrement
choke the air. The room’s fan blades fling

poisons in all directions, hoping to cast out
dust demons but soot continues
collecting in the room’s far corners—

granulated clumps of waste and sorrow
no sweet air can lift out,
no sponge scrub clean.

Here there is no sound of gnashing teeth.
No one screams against a paradise lost.
Hieronymus Bosch cannot be found

painting the tortures we’ve made
inside this fumigation cubicle. Sediments
spin out—the karmic wheel of chemicals and dust

colliding in new combinations—but the world
simply churns silently on, suspended particulates
growing as they gorge on air.

Monsoons come. Rains howl. Torrents
beat at my door and the living room floods.
I peer through the window glass, hoping

for a wind that can blast canyons of current
across this breathless plain. I pray for oxygen—
for gallons and gales of air to plunge across the city

like a tsunami—wild rivers of stratosphere
to flood the clogged roadways, pour through
the market’s twisted streets, overflow the boundary

of every tidy convention and choking habit.
We could rise up from our beds then, turn
from our work wheels and our burning,

push away the cogs and cobs. We would breathe
in, and in.

Like the mists of cloud, we would be
caught up into the air.

Become air.                              Just for a moment.

And when we breathed out,
the whole world would sigh—

would look up into the heavens
and whisper,

                                          “Blue.”




Puja for Saraswati

by Anna Citrino

From Canary Winter 2016-17

The village men brought her from the temple
in the back of their bicycle rickshaw, Saraswati,
the goddess of knowledge, music and art.

With her pale face and white gown and gold
paper decorations, she sat calmly on her wooden
“A” frame as the men wrestled her from her seat

and hefted her to the Yamuna’s edge, the river’s
wide skirts spreading toward us, air heavy
with sulfurous fume. Stocking-footed, the men held

the goddess above the bank, “Ek, do, teen,” a shove,
and in she fell, face first, kerplunk into the water
and mud. Then, splat, splat, splat, just like that,

three plastic bags stuffed with marigolds followed.
The men climbed into the rickshaw and drove away. Done.
Down river amidst decaying petals, plastic detritus

pooled around their bodies, lie the previous
Saraswati puja forms—wooden frames elbow-angled
above the water’s surface. Goddess of music, and art,

mouth pressed into the mud and muck, her white swan
drifting down a current of chemicals and sewage,
how does she go on singing?




Upon Learning Buddhist Monks Have Made Trees Priests

by Anna Citrino

From Canary Fall 2018

If trees were priests, wrapped in garlands of mist and moss
they would lift arms to the sun, dance, drink in the sky,
breathe out blessings in verdant song even as they do now.

But what would their prayers describe, their liturgies be?
Would they forgive the plantation owners, the loggers,
the developers? Would they willingly offer themselves

for the purpose of paper or to build fires, to construct
furniture and homes or to form musical instruments?
Who would they bless, who admonish, seek to reconcile or instruct?

Elm, birch, maple, oak, on windy days, rising with a flutter,
the under-face of leaves turned toward sun, I hear trees
chant the ancient wind song. Their liturgy begins,

arms stretched outward, yellow leaves swinging, falling,
scattering like incense spreading through hallowed air,
resting on the peat-softened floor to flicker and fade

like candlelight while the forest’s trunks crowd around singing
beneath rain’s soft baptism, renewal imprinted on the forest floor.
Redwood, pine, eucalyptus, sycamore, bay—the priests of days,

a thousand years old or two hundred, the trees watch me from my window
while I sleep and rise, walk and work, delivering their sermons in silence
while I bend at their feet, mute, palms resting humbly on their roots.

We cut and burn, plant and harvest, twist and prune them.
We revel in and ignore, praise and destroy,
though seldom revere them.

In Singapore, Buddhist monks at the edge of development
encircled trees’ trunks with robes of red ribbon encased
with prayers. Blessed them with oranges.

Tractors pushed torn jungle, raw earth straight up
to the rooted fringe of their feet.
Then stopped.

How would we live differently if trees were priests?




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