Our El Dorado
In partnership with 2023-2025 El Dorado County Poet Laureate Stephen Meadows, Arts and Culture El Dorado invites El Dorado County students to explore their hometown through poetry. We will publish every poem we receive from students in El Dorado County on this page. In addition, every poem we receive will be included in a chapbook of Stephen Meadows' own poems, which will commemorate his term as Poet Laureate. Every contributor will receive a copy of the chapbook.
“It is vital that written art forms like poetry remain available to all of us,” says Stephen Meadows. “Poetry is an essential human link that must survive.”
Our El Dorado was inspired by California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick's Our California, a joint project with the California Arts Council, which invited Californians to submit "a poem about their city, town, or state, exploring what they love about it, what joy they find in it, what they would change about it, or what they hope for." Our California poems can be read here: https://capoetlaureate.org/ourcalifornia
El Dorado County Poet Laureate Stephen Meadows
"Gold Country"
The small creek
once I’m sure
had gold
Now dry and deviled
by summer
and dust
I stand here
listening for the sounds
of water
and the cry of one
who has found
his nugget
shimmering
a sun
among stones
California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick
"My California"
Here, an olive votive keeps the sunset lit,
the Korean twenty-somethings talk about hyphens,
graduate school and good pot. A group of four at a window
table in Carpinteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi.
Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano
poet whose songs still bank off Fresno's beer soaked gutters
and almond trees in partial blossom. Here, in my California
we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy
you'd know we'd done this before. In Fresno, the bullets
tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day.
In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace.
In my California, you can watch the sun go down
like in your California, on the ledge of the pregnant
twenty-second century, the one with a bounty of peaches and grapes,
red onions and the good salsa, wine and chapchae.
Here, in my California, paperbacks are free, farmer's markets are twenty four hours a day and always packed, the trees and water have no nails in them,
the priests eat well, the homeless eat well.
Here, in my California, everywhere is Chinatown,
everywhere is K-Town, everywhere is Armeniatown,
everywhere a Little Italy. Less confederacy.
No internment in the Valley.
Better history texts for the juniors.
In my California, free sounds and free touch.
Free questions, free answers.
Free songs from parents and poets, those hopeful bodies of light.