Grace Marie Grafton
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I have taught poetry-writing to students (principally grade-school students) with CA Poets In The Schools for twenty-five years.  I have conducted workshops in more than 250 classrooms.  In each classroom, I teach an average of ten sessions.  I have received numerous CA Arts Council grants which enabled me to teach for nine-month periods in a single school as an Artist In Residence, working in-depth with all students in the school.  In 1998, I was awarded the Teacher of the Year by the River Of Words youth poetry and art contest, co-sponsored by Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate.

I most enjoy teaching lessons which draw inspiration from nature (using both photographs and field trips); art (both by established artists, contemporary and past, and art by students themselves); and family heritage.

I was born and raised in Reedley, CA, in the central valley.  I earned my BA from UC Berkeley and my MA from NYU, Manhattan.  I live in Oakland with my husband.  I have two children and two grandchildren.

Published books include: ZERO, VISITING SISTERS, Other Clues -- a book of prose poems published in 2010 from Latitude Press (rawartpress.com for info & sample poems). Chrysanthemum Orotorio, a chapbook of mixed forms, from Dancing Girl Press (dancinggirlpress.com/chrysanthemum.htm for info & sample poem), also published in 2010.  My sonnet, "Evoke," won the 2010 Soul Making Contest (SF Pen Women chapter). Other poems have been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, The Modern Review, The Listening Eye,  poetrymagazine.com and others. 
 

Peregrinate
 
Clouds puff the sky today like laundered
dustballs, proud to be clean,
free as dew suddenly risen to drift,
fluid chatter across August sky.
These young-girl clouds don’t care
what shadows they drop on earth,
they’ve earned their float,
they’ve worked in the kitchens
of San Francisco and Los Angeles,
they have lived in broccoli stems
and overheated strawberry leaves,
have been eaten and believed they’d
never see the sky again.
Meanwhile, down on the ground,
moles hurry to disappear from
sun’s focus, scratch tunnels
into minor replicas of
rivers that meander earth’s surface
as tree limbs carve inroads into air .
Hawks fly connections between
cloud and tree.  Ducks swim,
ponds reflect.
                 ~Grace Marie Grafton  


 

Illusion, Mother and Daughter
 
I expect the finches
want something from me,
 
perhaps my organdy apron
lime green as early morning and
 
fresh the way I walk devotee-ish
into seven a.m. and can imagine
 
climbing the limbs of the walnut tree,
but never do.  The replicas
 
of purple pansies and deep cerise
of cultivated freesia thread-dyed
 
into the frilly fabric, a gift from
my mother but I don’t wear it
 
as would the wishful waist
whose agenda it carries.  I don’t
 
serve coffee and dainty cookies
baked in a press and shaped
 
like shells at lipsticked parties.
My face plainer, I too-ardently
 
value wings, Mercury is my Rising.
I wear her apron only for hope.
                 ~Grace Marie Grafton  



Seed (October)
 
Resistant skin, chicory-colored,
taut over seed’s malleable core.
A drop, a tumble, who catches, what breaks?
Nodding to clarifying weather,
gentian-petalled evenings come earlier,
who would hold out against them?
They are lips of comfort,
slippery undergarment,
a promise kept.
 
When tree limbs turn smoky hues,
the club-footed California buckeye seed
peels out of its puckered hull,
gleams on the ground
like the brewed tea of China.
Dipping and rising over its rippling globe,
light brings in
the other side of the world.
                 ~Grace Marie Grafton  

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