Claudia Jensen Dudley
email
website: claudiajensendudley.com

Claudia Jensen Dudley has been a poet-teacher and storyteller with CPITS since 1990. She initiated and developed a 13-year poetry residence at Cabrillo Elementary School, taught 16 years in the Richmond District After School Collaborative, and has worked in many short-term poetry residencies in Bay Area elementary and high schools.

Her storytelling of world myth cycles and folk stories developed through after school work. The myth cycles she has learned (and tells with improvised harp accompaniment) include the Mahabharata and Ramayana plus tales of Krishna (India); the Peacemaker (Native America); the Milarepa, Quan Yin, Gesar, and Monkey King cycles from Asia; Greek, Egyptian and Norse myths; Arthurian and Celtic stories. In addition to many individual stories...

She's also a composer, who has set her own and student poetry to music for piano and soprano. Her publications include Waters of the Afternoon, A Song in Three Voices, with accompanying CD of Sushila's Canticles; The Fragrant Fire; and In the Scale of Worlds (chapbook). Her Songs from the Voices of Children was produced in 1999 and Four Songs on the Essence of Beauty in 1996.

She and her husband Bill have two grown daughters, two cats, and one beautiful granddaughter. Her website address is claudiajensendudley.com.

The Buddha’s Palm

If Monkey, with his great cloud somersaults,
could not vault it, why should we expect to land
anywhere but home? But we walk out early
the last evening in December, hoping against hope
any sidewalk will lead us to our true path.
We go down into the backyard, a winter garden
where blackberry vines have overcome
the grass we once planted by hand.
We tend what we can these days, but we too
are cracked asphalt, grass overcome,
and in time will be more so. We ask:
Who answers our footfall, our coming and going?
Isn’t search our long circumference,
and every arrival a new night of search?
Kneeling, we are left holding in our own
minute palms only the humus, dark and sweet,
that was never of our making.

And courage, a wing-flash, descending.

Grace at Midwinter

Always new, this vigil we keep
the self dissolved in pain
with our lit candles at the threshold
obeisant to rain
of day and night yields
ever to fire feeds
the bread we have always eaten
the spark and hope of reeds
but now, for the first time, tasted
made whole and hollow both
as rough to the touch as golden
within the palm of earth
at our lips, received, the opening
we who are but the prayer
of sudden summer in the heart
breathed out the reed with air
                  ~Claudia Jensen Dudley

After the Field Trip

Shirley, the gentle tutor, found a trapped mouse
after the field trip, in the room with the kids' backpacks,
caught on adhesive cardboard.   Streaks of blood
were on the cardboard, but the mouse was still moving,
pulling, pulling.   There was a strange stillness
in that white cardboard, in that non-release,
and the mouse had black bright eyes.  
Could we pry him off without injuring him more?   No.

So Shirley carried him outside, followed
by five of our wildest boys.   I stayed inside,
passing out Easter treats, gathering up nametags,
looking at my watch, impatient for day's end.

Then came to, suddenly.   Ran out to the playground to be
with the mouse and Shirley.   To be and do I knew not what.
Where was she?   Kids everywhere in the large playground,
running, running.   Then I saw the five boys, still for once,
in the far corner of the playground, hanging onto the fence.
Shirley's dark head was beyond them, outside the yard.
I saw Shirley's hands go up, down.   A pause.

Then she walked toward the gate, back into the yard.
She said to me, "I had to do it, I couldn't let it suffer."
I told her I could not have done it.
She said, "I couldn't touch it myself.   I dropped a soda can
with ice on top of it.   I feel so guilty."
I told her she did right.  
And knew, again, I didn't have the strength to do it.

Back in the cafeteria, one of the boys pointed
to Shirley and said, "Those are the hands of a killer!"
Shirley chased him around the cafeteria.
                  ~Claudia Jensen Dudley

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