Every August I offer this post recalling my travels around California, reveling in the late summer landscape. August is almost past, so please enjoy. Listen to the poet, Dana Gioia read the poem at the link below.

I reread this favorite poem by a California poet who also has an Eastern sensibility. I too am bi-coastal but at heart a native Californian. Please enjoy California Hills in August on this August day. Listen to Dana Gioia read the poem here.

California Hills in August

Poem by Dana Gioia

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion.
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain—
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

Read Dana Gioia’s bio here. His is a fascinating and varied career path.

Photo credit: Two Trees in Ventura California by Carsten Schertzer (Wikimedia Commons)