Celebrate Writers, Nature & Community To make a donation to Watershed mail your donation to Poetry Flash or click the link below to donate via credit card or PayPal August 2009 Dear Friend of Watershed, Please join us on September 26, when the fourteenth annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival will be held at Berkeley's Civic Center Park. We are glad to be back with a program that will inspire while conveying a sense of urgency for the environmental issues that confront us. Poetry can comprehend the earth, providing insight and motivation for action. Featured this year are outstanding poets, writers, and artists concerned about the "State of the Planet"&emdash;including author and California farmer David Mas Masumoto (Wisdom of the Last Farmer: Harvesting Legacies from the Land), New Mexico poets Arthur Sze (The Ginkgo Light) and Carol Moldaw (The Widening), Bay Area poet and novelist Kim Addonizio (Lucifer at the Starlight), Santa Cruz poet Joseph Stroud, Nevada City poet/eco-educator Chris Olander, Poetry Flash editor/poet Richard Silberg, K-12 student poets from River of Words, California Poets in the Schools, and Poetry Inside Out. Ecocity Builders and The Ecology Center will present eco-updates. River Village will feature exhibitors and a Creek Poem installation. A tribute to the late Bolinas artist/master teacher Arthur Okamura will be presented. An important part of the artistic vision of Watershed since its start, he designed and created our beautiful Watershed banners. The traditional pre-festival Strawberry Creek Walk will begin the celebration at 10 a.m. just inside the UC Berkeley campus at Oxford and Center Streets. You're invited to join our featured readers and environmentalists for a short hike along Strawberry Creek from the UC Campus through downtown Berkeley, tracing the route of the creek as it tunnels beneath the heart of the city to the site of the festival. Along the way, there will be poetry readings and presentations on "daylighting" and restoring the Creek. This year, poets appearing at Watershed will also visit Berkeley High School for exciting pre-festival poetry sessions with the students. Each year, we produce a letterpress broadside of a poem by one of our featured readers. This year we've selected "Spring in the Santa Cruz Mountains with Li Po" by Joseph Stroud, from his current collection, Of This World: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press). As a thank you, donations of $25 or more will receive this beautiful broadside. Your support is needed to help cover Watershed's expenses. It is essential that the Festival remain free, public, and open to all. Please send your tax-edeuctible donation to: Watershed c/o Poetry Flash 1450 Fourth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 Thank you for your support, Robert Hass, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1995-1997 Spring in the Santa Cruz Mountains with Li Po Here our life is the absolute clearness after rain. We sit in the middle of a path near an acacia tree. Under a rush of branches where the stream pools, a towhee dips its feathers, shuddering water into jewels of light. A squirrel shrills in the scrub oak, furious we have come near her throne of leaves. We hear the long drone of a wasp, far off, near the sun. Bees brush the yellow powder of acacia blossoms. Li Po says, "Imagine the taste of that sweet honey wine." This place is so many-tongued. Blackberry vines wander through sage. A strand of web spins sunlight into silk. It's no use to think here. We are not important. An ant tugs at my sandal, the wind rises, and we must go. It's all beginning, Li Po, dusk, mountains, the drifting clouds. Once we part from here who knows where the river of years will take us. ---Joseph Stroud