Sharron Egan Belson was born in Chicago, Illinois and has been a writer since early childhood. She gradually gravitated west to arrive in San Francisco in 1987, and is now a poet living in a redwood grove in Mill Valley, California. She teaches poetry locally as well as being a graphic designer and computer science educator. Her work can be found in The 1997 Renegade Press issue of A Summer Room. Her Rocket E-Book Love/Late can be purchased at barnesandnoble.com. She is also the author of Women & Solitude, A Webster Tea and Casual Swimming published by The Mill Creek Press. You will find her a regular on Salon.com and at Pathetic.org, a literary website journal.
You will also find Sharron Egan Belson's poetry on page 8104 of the 1998 edition of The Central California Poetry Journal, page 9104 of the 1999 edition of The Central California Poetry Journal, and on the Electric Shards page of this edition of The Journal.
Sharron Egan Belson's e-mail address is eganeve@netscape.net
and her homepage may be viewed at: http://home.pacbell.net/shabels/index.html
Come into the center
of me, with your voice of pure
molten male. Oh Frankie,
long gone such
as you are, I listen to you
in this small space
and my heart blooms
like a heated rose
in paradise.
One's feelings speaking
One's fears
One's delight
Poetry is the voice
Bringing romance back
The song of the opera
From an open window
The footfall of the child
Or the darkness of
Poetry is the salvation
With the gentle
to one's mind
no longer frightening
no longer hidden
of the troubadour
where utility reigned
ringing out in the night
in Venice
undeterred by the size of the world
the universe
of the mind at war
naive soul.
Visiting Charlie
wasn't the simple task
we assumed. They were rotting
in there. All of them.
Looking at a place
in the wall
the smooth wall.
A place that wasn't
there. Rolling a few inches
in their wheelchairs
and then a few inches
back. Nothingness,
that's what it consisted of.
Even his face was unrecognizable.
Nothing like his old self.
Nothing like his old smile.
Thanks for coming
he said, as though we were in his parlor
and in a sense, I suppose
we were.
So serious
A giraffe
But let the moon
And you are transformed
The deep probing kiss
As though this were our first
you are
by day
an archangel of the brooding
hands and the thoughtful glance
appear. Let the lamps dim one
by one
into the long
eager legs
the childlike
thrill
time under
this winter quilt.
When we were invulnerable
and perfect in every way
but one, we believed
and still sort of believe
in Cinderella. That we could be
her with golden dust
in our hair and silent smiles
on our full lips. We believed in princes
on horses and castles on top of high
hillsides where we could spin
our dreams into forever. Little children
at our skirts and husbands
who adored us into our nineties.
Truth is men wander
and children resent
gold tarnishes
and imagination
in the end, looses
steam.
All we end up with is geranium soap
in a hot bath
and quiet evenings with good books
and simple meals.
We end up with friends
like ourselves who have had near
death experiences on
and off the field of love. Women
with whom we can speak the truth
and hope it won't be used
to bury us.
Survival for another ten or twenty
years is the last gift and the only one
we can count on. Survival
is, I see, the last revenge.
When I come here
to write
I cannot say who it is
that calls me.
Nor can I promise to tell
the truth.
For when one writes
her truth shifts
with the perceived eyes
of the imagined reader
and her pen moves
reticently, reflecting the role
which she has agreed
or not agreed
to play.
Women hide almost
everything
from themselves and each
other. They smile
plastic smiles when they hear
a fact heretofore suppressed.
They think no one knows
about these unspoken
contracts yet it is clear everyone
knows. They see twisted men
rifling through trash
containers and they fix
their smiles for
posterity.
You can look across Kansas
scan the entire breadth of it
and there's nothing
but wheat. Yellow wheat
moving slowly like a large animal
to the sound of the wind.
And sky the color of cornflowers
uninterrupted by cloud or bird or plane
just blue blue.
True, California is rich
with mountains and ocean and canyon,
with men and money and culinary pride
but in the midst of all of this
perfection there are moments
like now, when I long
for the plains.
Two wizened ladies
at my table. I watch them
for signs of clear
gleaming crystal. Signs of what
comes to us all. Their skin
deeply lined; their eyes narrow now
and worn. Their hair high and white,
stiff to the touch. When I lie
"You're looking good", Ethel replies
I'm trying and I can see
in her poignant phrase, she finally is.
She's been trying the patience of her four
sisters for eighty-nine years.
She now reaches for my shoulder
(some imagined solidarity...some belated thread)
for her nights are devoid these days of human
breath and her bed is cold.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway 2001. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for
copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Sharron Egan Belson 2001.
Return to Central California Poetry Journal Table of Contents
Send email to the Central California Poetry Journal
Return to Solo Publications On Line
Return to Solo Publications Web Index
Back To The Top
