Speak Poetry in San Mateo County

Carole Groom

“There is something in the human spirit that yearns to be a part of a greater effort, to move a community forward.”
Carole Groom, County of San Mateo Supervisor District 2

Former Supervisor Carole Groom was elected to the Board of Supervisors in June 2010, served as President of the Board in 2011, 2015, and 2019. Prior to Supervisor Groom’s appointment in 2009, she served nine years on the San Mateo City Council, including two terms as Mayor, and on the San Mateo Planning and Public Works Commissions. Supervisor Groom’s priorities include expanded access to quality preschool and literacy, improved access to healthcare for all, environmental protection, preservation of County’s parks, and growing the local economy.

Along with Supervisor Warren Slocum, Supervisor Groom established the San Mateo County Poet Laureate program in 2013.

The Poet Laureate program was initially staffed by the San Mateo County Libraries. Members of the San Mateo County Poet Laureate Advisory Committee from 2013 to 2019 included Supervisor Warren Slocum; Supervisor Carole Groom; San Mateo County Poet Laureate Emerita Caroline Goodwin; San Mateo County Poet Laureate Emerita Lisa Rosenberg; Board Member of the San Mateo County Libraries JPA Governing Board and Council Member of Portola Valley Maryann Derwin; Office of Arts and Culture Executive Director Robin Rodricks; East Palo Alto Poet Laureate Kalamu Chaché; Editor and Publisher Christopher Wachlin; Visual Arts Columnist and Founding Board Member of City Arts Bonny Zanardi; Poet and retired educator Rosemary Ybarra-Garcia; Poet and Skyline College Professor Kathleen McClung, and Director of Library Services for San Mateo County Libraries Anne-Marie Despain. As of 2022, the San Mateo County Poet Laureate program is staffed by the newly formed Office of Arts and Culture.

Madeleine Hur

Madeleine Hur is a 17 year-old poet from Daly City, California. She is the first Daly City Youth Poet Laureate, a program supported by the Daly City Public Library Associates, and the first Youth Poet Laureate in San Mateo County. Currently a Senior at Oceana High School in Pacifica, she represents her school as a Student Trustee for the Jefferson Union High School District and is part of the Associated Student Body Congress. Named Daly City Youth of the Year in December 2021, she has represented Daly City and San Mateo County in numerous public events. Madeleine’s poetry is influenced by feminism and youth empowerment.

Poem on Belonging

DESTINATION

I need to go to a destination.
My map is blurry.
A man, sitting on a tall tree.
“Sir, which way do I go?”
He tells me,
“Swim across the road, climb the river.”
I shake my head, but say thank you.
A woman, sitting on a cloud high up.
“Ma’am, which way do I go?”
“Swim across the road, climb the river.”
I shake my head but say thank you.
A child sitting on a giraffe’s head. His legs dangle.
“Child, which way do I go?”
“Swim across the road, climb the river.”
I shake my head but say thank you.
This is impossible.
I will never make it.
I start to walk, but I turn back around.
“Child, have you ever been on the ground?”
“Of course not!”
I run to the woman on the cloud.
“Ma’am have you ever been on the ground?”
“Foolish girl, why would I?”
I walk to the man.
“Sir have you ever been on the ground?”
“What a silly idea!”
I roll my map.
My path is clear.

Poet Laureate Project

“Get Out the Vote” youth poetry & information event, with support from San Mateo County Elections Specialist Sara O’Brien, San Mateo County Poet Laureate Aileen Cassinetto and Daly City Public Library Associates Executive Director Victoria Magbilang.

Watch Madeleine’s performance at the San Mateo County of Education’s Arts as LIFE! Conference.

Rod Daus-Magbual

Dr. Roderick Raña Daus-Magbual, Mayor of Daly City, is an educator and has served on the City Council of Daly City since 2018. A Bay Area transplant via Riverside and Long Beach, he received his BA in Liberal Studies from UC Riverside in 2000, his MA in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University in 2004, and his Education Doctorate at the University of San Francisco in the Organization and Leadership Program with a minor in the International Multicultural Education Program.

Rod has taught education and Ethnic Studies courses at USF, UC Davis, Sonoma State University, City College of San Francisco, SFSU, and at Skyline College where he teaches in the Kababayan & CIPHER Learning Communities, and is currently Executive Director for the Pin@y Educational Partnerships.

He enjoys playing, reading, cooking, and raising his daughter and son, Amianan and Razón, with his wife Arlene. Rod truly believes that understanding the history of your people, comes with the responsibility to act. He’s motivated by love and the pursuit for peace and social justice.

Poem

A POET IS A POLICY MAKER

A poet is a policy maker
Every stanza, rhyme, and critical stance shifts people’s hearts and minds
It’s the reflection of time through narrative that brings life to words.
Speak your truth, speak from your heart, because your art are whispers from your ancestors.
Every stanza, rhyme, and critical stance shifts people’s hearts and minds
Your words are meditations where prayers are transformed into reality.
Speak your truth, speak from your heart, because your art are whispers from you ancestors.
Plant the seeds so they can grow beyond soil and become fruits for generations to come.
Your words are meditations where prayers are transformed into reality.
You are the paradigm shift that needs to happen.
Plant the seeds so they can grow beyond soil and become fruits for generations to come.
Challenge the closed mind with your stories of struggle, survival, and imagination.
You are the paradigm shift that needs to happen.
Your poems become policy as we ritualize new ways of being
Challenge the closed mind with your stories of struggle, survival, and imagination.
Culture shifts politics.
Your poems become policy as we ritualize new ways of being
It’s the reflection of time through narrative that brings life to words.
Culture shifts politics.
A poet is a policy maker.

Kalamu Chaché

Kalamu Chaché came to live in East Palo Alto with her family from Brooklyn, New York in the mid-1960s. After graduating from high school and pursuing a college education, she earned an Associate of Arts degree in Liberal Arts from Nairobi College in East Palo Alto. Chaché has been serving the City of East Palo Alto, the Belle Haven community of Menlo Park, and the greater San Francisco Bay Area and beyond in numerous professional, executive, administrative, advocacy, and artistic areas of employment and volunteer service. A strong advocate and practitioner of activism, advocacy, and volunteerism, specializing in the areas of youth development and the Literary/Music/Performing Arts, Chaché has worked tirelessly for many causes, events, and programs. An author of three volumes of poems and vocal recording artist of the record projects, Chaché has been East Palo Alto Laureate since 1983, the longest-serving poet laureate in U.S. history.

Poem on Belonging

WITHIN YOU IS A LIGHT

Within you is a light
That needs to shine bright
For others to see
The true possibility
Of what they will need
In order to succeed.

Someone, somewhere, is in need of an encouraging word
To listen to the voice within that’s been heard.
Somewhere, someone is trying to find a way
To have strength for what to do or say.
Let the light within you
Help someone to make it through.

Within you is a light.
Keep it forever shining bright.
Use it to connect in positive ways
That will be uplifting for all of our days.
Let the light within help you to be
What people in this world need to see.

Poet Laureate Projects

Kalamu Chaché is a poetry, jazz, and youth empowerment advocate proclaimed and called upon by the people of the City of East Palo Alto to the honorary post of community poet. She is the longest serving poet laureate in the United States.

Chaché founded Wordslam literary hub and the Wordslam Youth Poetry Contest.

Diane Lee Moomey

Diane Lee Moomey is a painter and poet living in Half Moon Bay, California, where she is co-host of the monthly reading series, Coastside Poetry; her work has appeared in Light, Think, The MacGuffin, PoetryMagazine.com, Mezzo Cammin, and others. She has won prizes for her sonnets in the Ina Coolbrith Circle and in the Soul Making Keats Literary Contests. Her newest collection, the chapbook Make For Higher Ground, is available at Amazon and from Barefoot Muse Press.

Poem on Belonging

FORTY DAYS

From deep within the rows of August corn, a trill,
vibrato—every other living voice is still
for just a breath. In tangled verge beside the field,
in trees, among the ears: cicada’s well concealed.
Then locusts recommence their creaking, leaping—sticky
feet rebound off stems of thistle, chicory
and me, bare-legged, deep in milkweed. Blackbird’s note.
I open woody pods, set flossy seeds afloat.
On porches, grandmamas weave ribbon out and in
and out of eyelets—stitch and snip, pin, un-pin—
for owners of curly-headed dolls. Yards of lace!
They’re fastening the ends around the tiny waists
while grampas speak in adages, chaw, lament
the fish that got away. Ayup. And without
a pause, it’s circling—as geese fly south and north
again and summer follows summer, bringing forth
another incarnation of this very thistle,
cricket, chicory and milkweed, ribbon, whistle
of blackbird and of train, the wispy rows of corn,
the grandmamas, the homilies—all circling, adorn
this life. Cicada trills again, from spot unknown.
Ayup. It’s forty days till frost, grampas intone.

Civic Engagement

Co-Host, Coastside Poetry, a reading series which provides a space where poets of every color, culture, sexual orientation and gender can feel they have a voice and a warmly welcoming audience.

Lee Rossi

Lee Rossi is a winner of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the Steve Kowit Prize. His latest book is Darwin’s Garden. Individual poems have appeared in The Southwest Review, Rattle, The Northwest Review, Spillway and The Southern Review. He is a member of the Northern California Book Reviewers and a Contributing Editor to Poetry Flash and Pedestal. Lee featured in the Peninsula Virtual Bookfest co-hosted by San Mateo County Libraries.

Poem on Belonging

I COME FROM SHOW ME

I am from Indian-head test patterns

From 20 Mule Team Borax and “pluck your magic twanger, Froggie”

I am from the last house on the left,

cinder blocks, two stories, fresh pink tuck pointing

I am from elephant garlic,

each whip crowned with flowers

I’m from wine drinkers and prize fighters

From Leo (not Gali-leo) and Gaia (not Mother Earth)

I’m from children should be seen and not heard, from don’t let the dog in the house

From keep your nose clean, and keep your nose to the grindstone

I’m from Stations of the Cross and Confession every month

I’m from Torino, out of New Orleans and the Guinea-hating South

Ham hocks with black-eyed peas and Chef Boy-ar-dee

From the service revolver my dad kept in his top drawer

From the costume jewelry that slept beside the gun

You’ll find it all in my book, the one I didn’t write

on the shelf beside all the other unwritten books

my family, our neighbors, the all but forgotten

Find Lee’s book in the library!

Say Anything (2024)

Veronica Kornberg

Veronica Kornberg is a poet from Northern California. Recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal, Menacing Hedge, The Shore, Spillway, and Tar River Poetry. She is a Peer Reviewer for Whale Road Review.

Poem on Belonging

HEIRLOOM

Child’s chair: sole survivor among
things touched by my grandmother.
The bent ash, soaked and rounded,
gleams where a girl’s muslin dress
once rubbed. Scratches, where buttonhooked
shoes scuffed. Patina darkened to blood
mahagony, sweat silted into every divot.
The husband lost to German cavalry.
The daughter and two sons handed over
to strangers. The starting over.

How did it feel to watch my mother,
late child of a second marriage, run
her dimpled hand over the same ashwood
or tilt back on two legs and stress the frame?
To see the seat canes breached, re-woven.
Such fights, such marmalades and moths
this chair has weathered, yet it promenades
still, with a subtle bend in the foot,
plaiting light by my workroom window.

Keiki Leni Ward

“My name is Keiki Leni Ward. I’m a spoken word poet and former student at Ravenswood Middle School. I write about my history and heritage, my environment, my community, and my hopes as a young woman of color. I have entered different poetry contests and have had my work featured by the Ravenswood Education Foundation as part of their Giving Tuesday campaign.”

Poem on Identity

PETUNIA

I used to think of myself as the forgotten
As a petunia that fell from a bush into the thick concrete
A plant that would never be able to replant itself
But would instead lay to rot
Where this petunia would constantly be smashed by the sneakers of those who walked by
Or perhaps burned by the sun
As petals fall off this once beautiful petunia
Parts of me began to fall off
and become disconnected
Discouraged, dissed, discombobulated even disfigured
Until my petals
my gifts were spread and all I was left with was to look at my shallow core
The core laid brown in dark secrets caved in by me
But maybe there is hope for a little ole petunia like me
Maybe a crack in the cement which allowed dirt to escape
A new opportunity
Maybe the right wind
Or the right angle
I just might grow
Like Tupac’s rose in concrete
Watch me blossom
watch me regrow
my petals loom in and my giving tree starts to grow
Watch my leaves tower over my lost dreams
Watch my leaves touch the shoes on power lines
Watch me make it out because my tears watered and grew my roots
I made it out because I found my roots
or maybe, I made it out because I had to lose all of my roots
So who am I?
I am more than the forgotten
I am not the rose that you knew which grew from concrete
I am the beautiful petunia which sprouted from a bush of dead weeds in the middle of these streets

Read Keiki Leni’s poem, “Mirroring Sea”.

Peter Neil Carroll

Peter Neil Carroll is an American writer and historian. He is the author of over 20 books, including Sketches from Spain (Main Street Rag, 2024), a lyric homage to the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Talking to Strangers (Turning Point Press, 2022); This Land, These People: 50 States of the Nation (Press Americana, 2022), winner of the Prize Americana; Something is Bound to Break (Main Street Rag, 2019); Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land (Turning Point, 2015); The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford University Press, 1994), winner of the 1995 BABRA Nonfiction Award; and the memoir Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History (University of Georgia Press, 1990). He is emeritus faculty in the Department of History at Stanford University, and is Poetry Moderator of Portside.

On September 16, 2024, after a brief illness, Peter passed away at the age of 80 surrounded by his family. Peter leaves behind a lasting legacy, and a space in our literary community that cannot be filled.

Poem on Belonging

BORSCHT

My grandpa Izzy adored borscht, slurped
the soup, steaming or cold, let the red juice
spread on his mustache and licked his lips.

Borscht. A Russian scholar once advised me
never to underestimate its power to make
a community, and in honor of Izzy I bought

the scholar’s book about an obscure laborer
in Tsarist Russia, depicting the daily lives
of a passionate people unknown to history.

They might be characters of literature, the stuff of
Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, yet not fictional,
revealing the dreams of ordinary men, women and

the making of working-class consciousness. They
drink too much, eat too little, get sent to prison,
yet he gives them something they never expected,

maybe even more than he imagined. I see them drinking
tea in filthy rooms, fired by factory foremen demanding
payment or sex from women workers, and confused by

students who try to uplift them with books they can’t
understand. He’s given them immortality, assuming
someone like me reads his book. His story tells much

less about my grandpa, a Jew in old Russia, lacking
even the slim benefits of Russian nationality. Refusing
discipline of factory work, he became an itinerant glazier,

carried his goods on his back, worked outdoors without
a timeclock in all weather and loved the glass he cut
and framed for all the light, he said, it brought to life.

Read Peter Neil Carroll’s ecopoems, “The Mountain Top” and “Appalachia“.

Find Peter’s books in the library!

This Land, These People (2022)
The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1994)
Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History (1990)

Shireen Malekafzali

In 2021, the County of San Mateo named Shireen Malekafzali its first-ever Chief Equity Officer. This is the second newly created County role aimed at bettering the welfare and outcomes of both employees and residents. Malekafzali’s 20-year career includes policy, teaching, research and coalition building work across the nation. She holds a Bachelor of Science in environmental studies and a Master’s in public health. She previously served as health equity officer for County Health where she led the health equity strategy including development of a seven-point approach for equitable vaccine distribution and developed a community-led COVID-testing model.

Watch an equity presentation by Shireen Malekafzali where she reads her poem, “I Am.” (Commission on the Status of Women Special Meeting, 1/11/2022).

Between 2021 and 2022, County Chief Equity Officer Shireen Malekafzali, in partnership with the San Mateo County Libraries, launched the “Equity Through Art Series” where communities of color share their stories and experiences through the lens of art, to culminate in a vision for the future of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in San Mateo County.

Poem on Belonging

I AM…

I am from the womb of a depressed warrior

From a land of empire, oppression, and poetry
From a climate of black outs, bombs, and instability

I am an immigrant.

A fresh lens on America – an awkward sense of self and belonging
I am from the ingredients of the American Dream –
from hard work, sacrifice, and loss,
school lunches, ESL, and luck,
emergency rooms, student loans, and struggle,
from strength and hope, and pain and more luck

A reluctant warrior – an introvert, a mom, a learner
I am from the skies of privilege and opportunity
Riding the winds of compassion and gratitude

Flying the spirits of ancestral hope
I am connected to all that is and has been
Guided by the light in my heart

Ever the optimist
Afloat on the waters of anxiety

A unique blend of apple pie – a splash of rosewater, a dash of pomegranate, with a foreign texture
I am the scars and ambitions of my parent’s dreams
I am a shadow of the American landscape