In ‘Fresno Poets Rise Up,’ voices are raised, and words become instruments to change the world

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At the “Poets Rise Up” event, five established poets also read their work: Marisol Baca, Glen Delpit, Corrinne Clegg Hales, Lee Herrick and Aideed Medina, Fresno’s current poet laureate.

Herrick is California’s current poet laureate, serving his second term. He is the first person to be reappointed to the position by the governor. Herrick read “Courage,” which he wrote to protest the deaths of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Silverio Villegas González and others at the hands of ICE. Published by the Academy of American Poets, it begins:

I almost stopped believing in the ocean.
Imagine that. I almost stopped believing
in the music of such massive natural splendor.
I had lost sight of it, lost sight of hope
because innocent people were killed
by people in masks, hiding their faces,
their shame parading as providence,
their weakness posing as policy.
But then, I remembered the tides.
I was restored by the courage of poets
whose songs sounded like ocean waves
guided by the moon. Even now, there is music.

In “Courage,” Herrick writes there is music in “children laughing on the swings,” “a student learning the saxophone,” “a woman reading her rough draft by the lake,” “a father whistling a love song in his native language.”

The poem concludes with these lines:

We are a massive natural splendor, too.
In the end, all we are is love and love and love.
In the end, the ocean and the music might save us.
Meet me at the beach. Bring your light.
Bring your songs. I’ll wait for you.

Meanwhile, Hales – an award-winning poet who taught for 35 years in the Creative Writing program at Fresno State – read “What You Don’t Know.” It is an autobiographical telling of the sexual assault she faced as a girl.

The assault took place six decades ago, and it took nearly that long for Hales to write about it. Now in her 70s, she said some details “maybe aren’t exactly factual, but pretty close.”

The poem begins:

What You Don’t Know

during the cold minutes while the boy holds a knife
to your 12-year-old throat, is whether you can scream –

or even speak – without forcing the sharp steel
into your own skin; you don’t even know

what the boy wants from you. He pulls your body
close from behind, one tensed arm crushing

your chest, the other kinked oddly across
your cheek, fingers grasping

the wooden handle of a knife, maybe
from his mother’s kitchen – it smells

of cooking oil – and his hips push into you
through your clothes, and you feel

his hardness and his breath pressing
into your ear. You don’t know why

he’s so angry

The poem tells how a passing car’s headlight startled the boy, giving the young Corrinne the opportunity to escape. It concludes:

In the morning, your grandma
will notice the scabbed-over slice

on your neck. She’ll listen, touch
your swollen face, pull a small bottle

of face makeup from her purse, and dab
and dab at your wound with her finger tip

until the whole thing disappears.

Showing that youth is no barrier to poetic depth, Singh – a sophomore at Central West High School – said in an interview she treasures the opportunity to write and be heard. “It means the world to be able to share my voice with young people who feel like me.”

In “Young People,” Singh says of her peers:

We are like dandelions –

not weak
not weeds
but life
that refuses permission

and every wind
that tried to scatter us

only spread us farther

into classrooms
into streets
into systems
that never expected us
to survive

turning resistance
into roots

Because even if we came from broken places

we are not the breaking

we are the rebuilding

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