 Good evening, I'm Pravelo Salazar, Director of the San Antonio Public Library. We have all the library staff, and to all of you, a very warm welcome to the earth and the library. This is a specialty meeting for all of us in the San Antonio Public Library, which is honored to be part of this event. San Antonio, as the city, is very fortunate to have so much talent in many areas. In the literary world, we have lots of talent. And so, when I reflect on San Antonio, but we have to offer as a city, we feel strong in the literary field that one cannot help but be proud of all the accomplishments of our drivers over here. And all of us are contributing to the literary world. So I feel very proud, and I'm very proud that we're part of the game of this event. Before I proceed with the introduction of our special guest, I would like to recognize some of our special guests for a year today. I'm going to start with our Chair of the Library, Port of Custodians, Jean Grady. Dan Nicholas, Board Member of Districts Representative District Kid, who is also here. I'd like to recognize Patty Ray, former Councilwoman for District 5, and now Member of the School Board of San Antonio National School District. Thank you for being here. Tracy Bennett, President and CEO of the San Antonio Public Library Commodation. Tracy, thank you for your support and for hosting this reception. I also want to recognize Jordan Bexler, who is the Chair of the Library Commodation Latino Leadership for the Library Committee. And speaking of this particular committee, I would like to recognize Dr. Alan Clark, who is the outgoing Chair of this very important committee. Welcome. I also want to recognize Katie Clayo, who is the Director of the San Antonio Public Festival, and she and her committee are working very hard to bring to San Antonio in April another fabulous Boat Festival here to the Central Libraries. I'd like to thank her for her efforts. Linda Harper, former First Lady, is also in the audience. And finally, a very dear friend, very someone that's very special to San Antonio is Carmen Tapoya, forward author, provider, and City of San Antonio forward, Gloria. We're so proud of you, so happy to be here. And my colleague, Felix Padron, who also contributed to this event, and without his help and the help of his staff, we couldn't make this event possible. So thank you, Felix. Thank you for being here also. One of the few individuals that got together, got excited from our staff, and he asked one of the first champions to really do something to recognize. I'm not going to introduce the special guest because someone else will be introduced. But there was a lot of excitement, a lot of passion bring together this forum. And obviously, by the very large attendance, we all feel very passionate about our guest of honor today. So at this time, I'd like to introduce Naomi Shihab Nye, who's the author of many books. She has been recognized, received many awards. She was also very dear to San Antonio, and is one of those talents that I referred to. Again, we're so fortunate to have her. She's also been a huge supporter of the San Antonio Public Library. I supported the Young Pegasus Youth Poetry Competition. Not only as a judge, but also as an advocate. So we're very fortunate to have Naomi be part of this program, and she will introduce our guest of honor, Naomi. Good evening. So wonderful to see you all here. Thank you for coming out. It's a very special day. I realized it may seem indulgent to read a poem of one's own when introducing another poet. But I have to. Please forgive me. This poem was written 33 years ago. It's called For Rose on Magnolia Street. You ask me to take off my shoes, and it is correct somehow, this stripping down in your presence. Do you recognize in me a bone, a window, a bell? You are translating a child's poem about the color gray. I float through your rooms, peeking at titles, fingering the laces you drape from your walls. The first place I visited you, a tree grew out of your bedroom, pulled up in the ceiling. Today there are plants in your bathtub. Their leaves are thick and damp. I want to plant myself beside you and soak up some of your light. When the street lamps cross their hands, when the uncles shuffle home from the market, murmuring of weather and goats, you lean into a delicate shawl. The letters people write you begin blowing in your baskets. Yesterday, a grope of the dog man who wanders everywhere, followed by a pack of seven animals. Soon you will tell us the secret behind our grandmother's soft hair. Well, she did, and she has told us so many things in so many ways and places. Her voice of humane and dignified curiosity, it says in the author's note for her exquisite new chapbook, begin here. Her deeply rooted interest in classical myths, folklore, family stories, and the history of both cultures that made her have been immense consolation and fortification in the lives of all of us. Thank you, Texas State Goethe Committee for recognizing her magnificence and naming her Texas poet laureate was a great act of wisdom on their parts. We are extremely lucky here in San Antonio to have not only our wonderful Carmen Tefuea as our city poet laureate and look at the other Texas cities jumping on our bandwagon to do the same and name their own. But Rose, as the first Latina, excuse me, how could this be? Ever named to the post, Niva Rose, opened a library for hosting this reading and to the Library Foundation and to Wing's Press for republishing her prize-winning again for the first time in the book, if you do not have it, get it if you have an old one and a new one and this beautiful new chat book. Thanks to Beck Whitehead and Leo B. and School by the Library Press, Southwest School of Art for creating such a glorious edition. We are always, always beginning here and again. Rose's poems teach us this. Romero for Bonanzi, who's here tonight, wrote a marvelous review of her work recently for the San Antonio Express News. And thank you, Steve Bennett, for including this poetry review in the paper. He described Rose's poems as having narrative ferment chiseled in long, elegantly looping learnings. He speaks of her affection for the Latin motif and also I think of this in her work as a kind of view or counterpoint attention. I love The Labyrinth by Lawn of Shoots, the cover of the book. I've always loved Rose's poems, Swallow Wings, which begins, I've been to church books. I'm an east side Mesken Greek and the ways she weaves together multiple mysteries, a flying oak and closed memories and silences, radiating possibilities, himming and stitching, diligently, decisively, patiently. Her poems sound read ring like no one else's. Their long lines linger in a reader's mind frequently popping up in memory just when you need them. This is a gift. She is richly original. Rose has never been a jitterbug slapdash look at me kind of brush. She has been the held note the long loving process. The way we all revive in radio. She has indeed shown warm light on our grandmother's soft hair and honored it, honoring all deep time in radiant understanding. She has encouraged the growing wellspring of children's voices, abiding in our streets and yards and schools and the voices of community writers, even those in juvenile detention, even those who have never been listened to before. She has fought on many fronts for increased literacy as she knows there is nothing more important. She has changed lives everywhere she goes. I know this firsthand because, oddly, people have often mistaken us for one another and given me there you changed my life testimonials. And they said, thank you, Rose. At various times, we need more braids but otherwise we find this somewhat weird. Rose could tell stories about all the work she's done as a Balliant Arts Administrator, a job she worked locally for many years for Gemini Inc. And in California for San Francisco's Poetry Center, where she was a staggers fellow and did all kinds of amazing work. She loved us for that while, but thank goodness she came back. Tonight, this magical night, she will bless us with her poems. Thank you, Bea, for this wonderful rose from your garden. Please welcome our homegirl, the Shining Rose of Poetry for all of the state of Texas. I need to go home. Thank you, Naomi. Thank all of you. Thank the library. Thank you to the Foundation. Thank you, DCCD. Everybody who works so hard to do this wonderful event is so, so deep in your reach. And so does my mom, me. I want you to dedicate this reading to her this evening. My mom is nine years old and she will tell you that whenever you ask her again even if you don't. I'd like to begin with a poem by the other son, Lorne Lariat. She was Lariat from 1947 to 1949 and that was many of you may have known her, Allie B. Carter. Paul Carter's grandmother. And she was, you may also know, she was the wonderful lady who lived in the house with the observatory on the auditorium circle. And Allison Curie who was a child when she was doing some of her wonderful things said that any child that attempted to go out there and get the ice cream on Saturdays because the Sally instead out there gave people ice cream. So I want to read a poem of hers called Blue Reach of Space. Give me the blue reach of spaces that stretch to the rim of the sky and the far amber plain that traces the shadow where eagles fly. There is music in the lives of the bunnies and hymns where the hills are long and the wild burbunas are sunnets in the land of the cactus prong. Give me the blue reach of spaces where the winds are gluiting by where the earth looks up and faces the light of a boundless sky. If you can find this book it's a wonderful book. John Ligo edited the book together from a number of Miss Ellen's previous books. It's a wonderful book. It's called Now, Not Between. I'd also like to especially thank Vicky Anish of the library and Frank DeLong of DCCB. Either one of them could be here tonight but very hard on this one. Thank them very very much. I'm so sad that they're not here. I'm going to read a little bit from again for the first time but first I'd like to part the recognition of Miss Ellen's long-standing commitment to working for peace that she did for many many years and also because it's the way I'm pleased to open the names of women I think it is a prayer for peace. It's a poem of Takama Kamada Lee. It's translated by Peter Cole, Eliah Lajazi and Gabriel Levin and it's called Revenge. It's the kind of revenge we should all pray for. At times I wish I could meet in a duel with the man my father and raised our home expelling me into a narrow country and if he killed me I'd rest at last and if I were ready I would take my revenge but if it came to light when my rival appeared that he had a mother waiting for him or a father who put his right hand over the heart's place in his chest or his son was late even by just a quarter for me to make sense then I would not kill him even if I could. Likewise, I would not murder him if it were soon made clear that he had a brother or sisters who loved him and he constantly longed to see him or if he had a wife to greet him and children who couldn't bear his absence and whom his gifts were thrilled or if he had friends or companions neighbor to you or highlight from prison or hospital room or classmates from his school asking about him sending him regards but if he turned out to be on his own cut off like a branch from a tree without a mother or father neither sister nor brother wifeless without child without kin or neighbors or friends colleagues or companions then I would not add a thing to his pain within that alumnus not the torment of death and not the sorrow of passing away instead I would intend to abort him who I'd hasten by on the street as I'd convinced myself that paying him no attention in itself was a kind of revenge What's the Palestinian color for how valuable you should be looking at these? Very, very beautiful. I'd like to read a couple of things as I say from again from the first time some of these I haven't read it's a long time it's kind of a new experience to go back to them this is a poem called there has to be something more than everything and it has an epigraph from the blogger Mabachov oh everywhere all around the trees are Harlequin's words are Harlequin's so are situations and sums put two things together jokes, images and you get a triple Harlequin come on, play invent the world invent reality but there are things that have been torn away from office and we need to connect the shadows the pain as it goes along the soul and faded fragments we need to put as many old pieces as we can together to make something else in retirement as many times as we have to as long as it takes there is for instance this morning I've been running from for years my life floating off to Mexico sure that time was in abundant supply and leaving out me showing the nurses how to find the veins in his arms showing them access to the bloodstream the way only a junkie could know it leaving him with a splendid view of the Texas hill country and his own short live certainty of Harlequin's and most of his heart that would soon fall apart trust open to a series of blips scattered across a hospital a dream screen leaving him knowing which words are the last and how they should be spoken the story of death is infinite in its variety but the end is always the same this time it comes with the impersonal scratching a long distance line someone saying sit down and listen how he's gone I clutch the edge of a hard bed in a hot hotel room in an ancient country where there is nothing at this moment except a senseless dead-end present no past no future downstairs in the courtyard a woman with a face older than the first sign forgets and shifts corn into cakes intended only for the living the jaguar leaves his temple stone and godhood behind and lets his claws and teeth go soft with mortality the orchid suspends its sweetness high in the canopy as if there will be no tomorrow as if yesterday the young bride had not fixed love into her hair to that come this far to see time snag and heavy around my closest cousins still warm body to that come this far to watch him finally drain away in that slow motion torrent he had always claimed as his own rhythm today is six years to the day he was buried I know because Albert just called to tell me that he's a little bit drunk and that he's hooked up a batch of chicken pre-drilled and why don't I come a little over and the damned calendar never folds its hands and legs like the rest of us and yesterday was Father's Day this year is even a mere black mark precisely sitting apart in the hours between the sunday and its first-born ride and the fuel on Monday and we talked about growing old and how the body begins to falter and about the new camera that sleeps too comfortably and when not in use can fold down to only six inches on top of the car and about taking Uber and Sister Junior to their hometown in the battle to visit the gold pond and about how electrical engineers have impatiently taken over the function of real watchmakers without having an inkling of how to order the true message of time and about the sons who are left and suddenly there is something more than everything everywhere all around in the mundane inventions living and grieving in a way we are somehow bound together by this thing called family that each of us celebrates so differently but sometimes not so differently after all just one stop on the way to pick up a loaf of French bread to go with the chicken My friend and I we forget for the first time and this is from the Greeks so there could be silence this is a piece that's spoken in the voice of Odysseus it's pretty much hubris to write an agenda other than one's own but certainly to decide that one is Odysseus when female is how Texas is interested but anyway this is Odysseus he's speaking it's called Odysseus comes up with an alloy cure for time the epigraph is from Niko's cousin Zaki's his eyes dilate like a gold cap spread down his belly then swiftly sleep though motionless through the sky's dome and spy on the whole bastard world generations and more generations each one leaving its shadow on the next no wonder you've slowed down content to barely shuffle along you have scarcely a thought of flying except when I wrote your subject I know what you will say that it was easier in my day true, the shades haven't mattered quite so deeply most citizens still stepped fairly lightly under their loads and the goodly number among us flew with ease hardly making a mark on the air and yes, we flyers were the heroes nobody out about that but I keep telling you we work hard for it anyone who aspired to be lighter than air faced the prospect of everything from sirens to being turned into a dog for this trouble still needed gracefully willingly not like now it is when you have people contenting themselves with this or that fragment of memory a snippet of myth leaving the real adventures up to a bunch of musky old books hardly anyone reads anymore but wait don't go I really have to come here just to shame you the point is I think we can do something about all this come closer take off your dress let me touch you here and here no no pull away let them laugh let them make up their ugly stories about the dirty old wanderer who was once a hero and the crazy woman trying to throw off her blanket of shadows let them say we can't couple with time we can I tell you that we take closer to one another is one more hope for all of us there's some danger of course the world's clocks and calendars are scattered with the blood of worthy lovers but look what we stand to gain the chance to make all these paths we reach across tremble and explode with muteness the chance to pitch stars into the heart of everything the exclusive chance that you join me flying and become the mother of another first child one who will begin again one we will have made to tumble out of a way worried only one shadow her own let's say that this wonderful chapel that the original artwork of Baloch's original stituary is on view in the reception room so that you can see it and see in incredibly tiny stitches this woman was able to make very frightened very frightened this is called memory in the making a poet is dedicated to Mora de Segandes remember the tale where the maiden lets down her long charged deer for the lover he's climbed to her tower hanging by open credits by the very roots of her dreams this is not that story which even then was vague about who if anyone was stated no, we are just past what some call without ironing the American century at my university students who own beavers provide bikes into the fields for earth sciences while brown men from another country buy to other fields for food the students remember this the brown men that they are not the same I say this as plain fact though many hope sincerity has been cheapened for the next age a little girl called Shelly leaps on her way to the school bus she wears jellies cheap plastic copies of a Greek fisherman's hat sandal she spoke Spanish before English her Salvadoran lago her parents at work pink keys purple p-janes clanked against her boy's backpack she did not dream last night Tuesday she watches a family of lizards creeping around the leech trunk of a dead redwood climbs leech bones in the wedgerid ola of the sky I can't see children these days without asking what the old member of all this am I Shelly's Miss Francis strange neighbor woman who dressed me in shawls and sang sadly in German whose husband it was told went up in flames on the Hindenburg how do we know what will touch a child mark her forever remember the girls in their pale sun dresses remember the women they became and then there's the memory locked in the cells in the blood certainly potatoes are a kind of faith to the Irish also recall Poland someone's grandfather escaping under his mother's skirts this cliché all that's left of being Polish Jewish poor even so the moment still somewhere in the bone potato stubble smoke strong smell of a woman's skirts becoming cattle gazing at grandmother what did she know and how did she learn it and now we're everywhere and nowhere video phones internet no borders in the air fresh blood on the ground how to dance where does memory go in all this to work we wear we wear the black velvet hat that came with the dream loosen our tongues with the fire of roasted cheetahs the Greek women have slowly danced off the cliff of their village to keep out of the hands of the terrorists and here we are on the purple live of the unknown telling and telling and there's no such thing as going to near the sun each time and each time the first just past the close of the American century the child's plastic keys ran down the street and I wrote for for more than ever quite some time ago and as many of you may know Maury took over people's hearts and he would just walk into your yard and find things and well you just wouldn't know it unless you caught him after beating around would you and so he did that in our yard we were to go out for a couple of years now he planted poppies and it caused this homeland it's called a partial history of poppies for more than ever you plant a border of poppies in my yard visit on chilly mornings to keep vigil clutter that we all must do something for this world and I remember the red ones were sacred to Ceres when she was still called to meet her and would not give the world that its corn color the warm air that sprouts seeds until her child should come back alive from death trickster food over and over again she found her Stephanie without memory among the shadows barred with Hades for the months that hadn't been swallowed with his dark kernels this is how he got spring the glory that has left her life in the face of death the recurring poppies our faith in resurrection even though the vital tells of seeds that fall on stone and so will not grow even so each spring all freeze to the harshest island where's an adamant veil of poppies one bloom it is told for every drop of blood in her shed in war think of it that Troy wasn't the beginning or Hitler even close to the end that poppies contradict raising stubborn little fists all over the world yellow and Iceland white in Asia Latin America the Middle East ground in Africa everywhere the famous red that finally all blood is the same color if memory serves on Koli mastery it's not yet spring and there are poppies sleeping in rusty coffee cans the old woman who dampens the seeds each morning is not the grandmother of the 6 year old who won't speak since her insides were raped to shreds are her mother's junkie orphan he's another version of ourselves and the old woman the leap of the heart and I that imagines her to be the grandmother who might yet save the child these two are versions of the poppy of Demeter and Wadalupe and the choice among versions remains ours like the borders where we either meet where we either meet or come apart like everything we do to keep from falling on the stone I'm not like Wadalupe here and when I began my professional career as a journalist there's many, many words about and one of the things that I loved to do and still love to do is find albums of great stories and take down their stories as found poems and it's not my fault that some of those overs are in bars I mean that's my bad so you may remember that before Earl started revitalizing all around that area there was a bar on the left-hand side of the street coming in right around where Earl is and it was called I-Lower and they keep on saying this I-Lower but it was there and it was called the I-Lower and I pretty much took this down verbatim from Earl who ran the I-Lower it's called Pearl at the I-Lower on Broadway in 1975 named this place to fund the Devil that old stuff that I had in the hands of the Devil's work and some close calls in here but never nobody killed mostly just hard work and jokes getting a little tension on when I'm having trouble I could just pick the guy up on one of them stools and pitch him out Jake my first man in me opened up here and he worried that somebody delicate as me looks little of a thing should be in this line of work you know and the guys here know it Nick in this place was a joke a good one I've been telling them for years you got it in this business light and upload some for these boys used to there was more business that was still remainin' the street we stood right out on that sidewalk once me and my Jake had watched Teddy Roosevelt and their rough riders on great downtown Fort Smith a lot of them boys come in here some boys always have still if you come in you're still in one of them discos soldiers have come back in here years later back on a visit and I'd call their name even if they'd lost some here and put on some fat amazing what you've done my name ain't been pearl they call me that after the bird began in the street it's alive and I'm going to read one more and again in the manuscript um Henry Cruz he's one of my favorite poets one of my masters has a book which is truly called Tell Me Again How the White Hair and Rises and Plies Across the That Twilight Toward the Distant Islands and in this book he has a poem called Up Distress Being Humiliated by the Classical Chinese Poets and he writes to the Classical Chinese Poets as his master so I have taken a leave from that and have written to Hayden as my master and the poem carries an epigraph from his poem when everything happens at once no conflicts occur letter to the master on the possibilities of timing master yesterday in Chinatown my eyes kept leaving the teeming streets miles of trinkets to turn up toward the balconies floating there bright and intricate as the undersides of the sandstorms how comfortable with the thousands of years one must be to lean a wet string lock over a railing of gilded dragons how precisely faithful like it does when I stood shifting my weight in the chill listening to an old chasman doing mingas in a doorway how he said he's forgotten the names of the notes now just raised the music and up it went that music alongside dense voters of herbs and incense keeping precious time until I swear I heard huge wings beating as if from every shop and alley ancient cranes silk, jade, paper, bone were rising toward that kind of memory that promises just the right timing my friend Xi says the Chinese idiagram for tree can mean many things in time two trees take the shape of a forest simultaneous light and shadow becoming a thousand doorways all opening into the world all opening out and I'm in a library foundation and I think Rose is all the people being here tonight and look at this room so the library is all about information and poetry and just wiggling around to invite you to the idle hour next door after that first I'd like to present Rose with a look at Julie and I know when you go next door you'll see our beautiful Julie that is in commemoration at the library so now I'm sweet so thank you Miss Rose I want to thank everyone for coming and please go next door and enjoy thank you when you were over in Europe did you ever do any speaking as speakers former in Hyde Park actually I wasn't allowed into England I didn't have enough money did you have to have a certain amount of money or do you have a lot of training in England now I didn't have that do you do much grind for if you're mostly on grind mostly on grind do you do a lot of internal grind oh ok are you aware of how it's basically as a margin to set up you're down down here which is why four days out of the week usually nothing's going on yeah well check out some of the license fees to set up any class that I was lucky enough to set up you need to jump to campus with your drone papers drone papers we're going to adjourn bye