March 10 - Ina Donna Coolbrith

Ina Donna Coolbrith March 10, 1841 – February 29, 1928

Born Josephine Donna Smith, Ina Coolbrith wrote poetry from the age of eleven and was published at fifteen. A marriage at age seventeen ended three years later in a sensational divorce.

She then moved with her family to San Francisco and became prominent in the Bay Area literary community, writing well-received poetry and holding salons with other writers of the time. In the early 1870s she abandoned hopes of traveling to take care of her mother and her ailing sister, a widow with two young children.

Unable to properly support them all, she moved to Oakland and took a job with the Oakland Library Association, a position she held for nineteen years. When that ended she moved back to her literary roots in San Francisco. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, followed by devastating fire, destroyed work she had begun on a literary history of California. Friends helped her begin anew and she resumed writing and holding literary salons. Her poetry output flourished during this period--she was California's first poet laureate (1915)--until severe arthritis prevented her from continuing. Cared for by a niece during this latter period, she died in 1928, at the age of 87.


Some poems by Ina Donna Coolbrith:


The Mariposa Lily

Insect or blossom? Fragile, fairy thing,
Poised upon slender tip, and quivering
To flight! a flower of the fields of air;
A jeweled moth; a butterfly, with rare
And tender tints upon his downy wings,
A moment resting in our happy sight;
A flower held captive by a thread so slight
Its petal-wings of broidered gossamer
Are light as the wind, with every wind astir,
Wafting sweet odor, faint and exquisite.
O dainty nursling of the field and sky.
What fairer thing looks up to heaven's blue
And drinks the noontide sun, the dawning's dew?
Thou winged bloom! thou blossom-butterfly!



San Francisco: April 18,1906

In olden days, a child, I trod thy Sands,
Thy sands unbuilded, rank with brush and briar
And blossom - chased the sea-foam on thy strands,
Young City of my love and my desire.

I saw thy barren hills against the skies,
I saw them topped with minaret and spire;
Wall upon wall thy myriad mansions rise,
Fair City of my love and desire.

With thee the Orient touched heart and hands,
The world-wide argosies lay at thy feet;
Queen of the queenliest land of all the lands -
Our sunset glory, regal, glad and sweet!

I saw thee in thine anguish tortured! prone!
Rent with the earth-throes, garmented in fire!
Each wound upon thy breast upon my own,
Sad City of my grief and my desire.

Gray wind-blown ashes, broken, toppling wall
And ruined hearth—are these thy funeral pyre?
Black desolation covering as a pall—
Is this the end—my love and my desire?

Nay! Strong, undaunted, thoughtless of despaire,
The will that builded thee shall build again,
And all thy broken promise spring more fair,
Thou mighty mother of as mighty men.

Thou wilt arise, invincible! supreme!
The world to voice thy glory never tire;
And song, unborn, shall chant no nobler theme—
Great City of my faith and my desire.

But I will see thee ever as of old!
Thy wraith of pearl, wall, minaret and spire,
Framed in the mists that veil thy Gate of Gold—
Lost City of my love and my desire.



Only a Rose

Only a Rose! Waif of a day is it-
So brief a thing, indeed!
Yet all the mystery of life is writ
Within it, could we read.



The Night Wind

(Song)
The night wind in its passing
Sweeps the blossoms of the tree,
And fragrance, like a melody,
Is wafted up to me.

I know not whence, nor whither,
Of fragrance born, of song,
But O, but O, the memories
Tonight that ‘round me throng!



In The Grand Canon

The strongholds these of those strange, mighty gods
Who walked the earth before man’s feeble race,
And, passing hence to their unknown abodes
In further worlds, left here there awful trace.
Turrets, and battlements, and toppling towers.
That spurn the torrent foaming at their base,
And pierce the clouds, uplifting into space.
No sound is here, save where the river pours
Its ice-born flood, or when the tempests sweep
In rush of battle, and lightnings leap
In thunder to the cliffs; no wing outspread
Above these walls, lone and untenanted
By man or beast, -but where the eagle soars
Above the crags, - and by the gates they guard,
Huge, and as motionless, on either hand,
The rock-hewn sentinels in silence stand,
Through the long centuries keeping watch and ward.
Up from the sheer abysses that we tread,
Wherein pale shadow holds her mystic sway,
And night yields never wholly to the day,
To where, in narrowing light far overhead,
Arch capping arch and peak to peak is wed,
We gaze, and veil our eyes in silent awe,
As when Jehovah’s form the prophet saw.



Evenfall at the Gate

A rose-shot purple on the sunset hills,
And skies of golden fire;
Silence that like a benediction fills
The hour, save where the lyre
If ocean throbs, in strains that fall and rise,
Against the harbor bar;
Then dusk, and on the brow of Tamalpais
Trembles a single star.



Daisies

Wherefore is it, as I pass
Through the fragrant meadow-grass,
That the daisies, nestling shyly in sweet places,
Lifting crispy, curly heads
From their wee, warm clover-beds,
Seem to my imagining, little elfin faces.

Can it be the daisies speak?
Leaning rosy cheek to cheek,
In a merry gossiping, lightly nodding after?
Or a fancy, that I heard
Just the faintest whispered word,
And a silver-echoing ripple of soft laughter?



At Set Of Sun

Along yon purple rim of hills,
How bright the sunset glory lies!
Its radiance spans the western skies,
And all the slumberous valley fills.

Broad shafts of lucid crimson, blent
With lustrous pearl in massed white,
And one great spear of amber light
That flames o’er half the firmament.

Vague, murmurous sounds the breezes bear;
A thousand subtle breaths of balm,
Blown shoreward from the isles of calm,
Float in upon the tranced air.

And, muffling all its giant roar,
The restless waste of waters, rolled
To one broad sea of liquid gold,
Moves singing up the shining shore!



A Fancy

I think I would not be
A stately tree,
Broad-boughed, with haughty crest that seeks the sky;
Too many sorrows lie
In years, too much of bitter for the sweet.
Frost-bite, and blast, and heat,
Blind drought, cool rains, must all grow wearisome,
Ere one could put away
Their leafy garb for aye,
And let death come.

Rather this wayside flower!
To live its happy hour
Of balmy air, of sunshine, and of dew.
A sinless face held upward to the blue,
A bird-song sung to it,
A butterfly to flit
On dazzling wings above it, hither, thither-
A sweet surprise of life-and then exhale
A little fragrant soul on the soft gale,
To float-ah, whither!



A Good-By

Good-By!
Under whatever sky
Thy pathway be,
Near or afar,
Clear be its light of sun, its light of star:
Bright as the memory
We hold of thee,
Good-By!

Good-By!
Let not our parting sigh
Be wholly lost in the new words that greet.
New loves may be as sweet,
New friends may serve as surely,
Hold as dearly, love as purely,
But never hearts may be
Truer than these whose thoughts go after thee, -
Good-By!
Good-By!


--Cat